Apparently there’s a movie in theaters now by the name of The Hunger Games – it’s sort of obscure, so you may not have heard of it. Despite the title, it does not have anything to do with food. No, apparently it has something to do with young people fighting to the death on TV, or something.
Over on the Fox News website, Dr. Keith Ablow – described as “a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team” – is shocked to discover that this film contains:
1) Attractive young people
2) Violence
This deadly combination alarms Dr. Ablow, who warns:
The Hunger Games … adds to the toxic psychological forces it identifies, rather than reducing them. …
It is an entertainment product of complete fiction and great potency, given its intense level of fantasy and violence. As such, it only conveys young people closer to “expressing” in a virtual format their powerful and primitive instincts (potentially kindling their desire to truly express such instincts) while conveying them further from their daily realities and a little further still from their real selves.
And apparently the film fails utterly in inculcating hostility towards the Kardashian family.
Almost no one will emerge from a theater swearing off shows like the Keeping Up With the Kardashians, or Jersey Shore because they are produced by adults happy enough to make a buck off of stupefying teenagers.
As I am sure you are all aware, inculcating hostility towards the Kardashians is the aim of all great art, as Aristotle explained so many centuries ago:
A tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious, and also, as having magnitude, complete in … with incidents arousing pity and terror, with which to accomplish its purgation of these emotions. Those Kardashian girls are such stuck up bitches — “ooh i got a big ass, everybody look at me!” And don’t even get me started on Snooki.
Hey, can I get a goddamn gyro here?
That quote is, of course, from Aristotle’s famous treatise “Ho-etics.”
In addition to not inculcating hatred towards the Kardashians, Dr. Ablow warns us, The Hunger Games will make its viewers
more likely to come out of theaters having shed some measure of the healthy psychological defenses (which are, luckily, partly reinforced by socialization) that keep them at a distance from their violent impulses. …
Other than entertaining millions and millions of teenagers and making millions and millions of dollars, the net result of The Hunger Games is likely to be:
1) Females will be further distanced from their traditional feminine characteristics that … suggested they were not being real “girls” if they were extremely physically violent.
2) Young teens and many pre-teens will be awakened to the fact that they are capable of extreme violence, given the right set of circumstances.
3) A few psychologically vulnerable teens—who would have come to no good anyhow—may be inspired to replicate the film’s violence.
So I’m guessing that’s a big “thumbs down” from Dr. Ablow.
Given that the mainstream media is but a tool in the hand of our gynocentric matriarchal overlordsladies, I’m not quite sure how this article slipped through. But we’re lucky it did.
Over on What Men Are Saying About Women, where I found big chunks of Ablow’s essay quoted without any explanation of where they were from, our good friend Christian J. explains that:
This movie is straight out of the slut-feminists’ arsenal of the “You Go Grrrllll” mantras. They have promoted violent women and will continue to do so (think Valerie Solanas). Slut-feminists justify this action under their delusional and blatantly false claim that women should be able to protect themselves as they are constantly attacked and physically abused on a daily basis, everywhere they go..
Where they get that from is ofcourse by generating their own falsified and doctored statistics which they have done for too long to remember.
If anyone suggests you go see The Hunger Games, they are probably a slut feminist. You should run far away from them in case they decide to punch you.
Go watch old episodes of The A-Team instead, a show which is totally not violent in any way.
CWS: That’s not just any dog–that’s Uggie from The Artist!
@Katz
*puts film on ‘To Watch Over Summer’ list. Let’s hope it’s on UK!Netflicks*
*squee noise*
I just looked up Jack Russels on Youtube. I’m a big fan of terriers.
@ Maya Lovelace – Awesome.
And just to follow up: how about that goddam transgressive, freaky “Cosi fan tutte,” by that Marxist/Alinskyist socialist monster, Wolfgang A. Mozart? It’s chock-full of evil ideas like, women feel sexual desire! Even worse: men can love women just as if they were, yannow, actual people, and therefore, men (who are ALSO supposedly goddam “people,” and how socialist is that?) can sometimes forgive women for their sexual “transgressions.” Too f**king bizzarre, amirite?
I’m pretty lucky because I have student insurance (which I can’t afford, which my parents help me pay for).
The two funny things about insurance are:
1. How costs magically disappear
2. How expensive everything still is (because it isn’t YOUR costs that are disappearing)
I still can’t afford over $1000 for a colonoscopy when the insurance covers the other $3000+. And why is it that my insurance DOESN’T EVEN PAY the $60 left over from my X-ray? But I have to pay $40. So what you’re telling me is that if I were uninsured, I would be paying $100, but having insurance makes the cost of an X-ray only $40.
That happened to me before once too. My dad had really nice insurance and we only paid $1500 or so for my $35,000 hospital stay. The insurance paid about $5500. Magic disappearing costs!
Right now I have a wisdom tooth with a cavity. I need it extracted, but I know it can cost $700 or so. So what am I going to do? Wait until it gets unbearable. It’s been “kind of annoying” for the last four or five years. And what’s going to happen? Maybe it’ll get infected and I’m going to need antibiotics or something. I don’t know. Unless I beg my parents to help pay … I mean, that’s about all I can do. And it sucks that it has to be like this. I’m less hesitant to go to the doctor because I can go to the clinic on campus and probably pay nothing, but anything that they don’t do (specialty, dental, etc.) I just can’t afford to pay for, and that means I’m not getting that colonoscopy my doc said I should have every year (to be fair, he was a jackass), and will just hope everything stays hunky dory, and I’m not going to the dentist because they’re all crooks who charge what they like. I can’t get the MRI on my foot because it’ll cost too much.
And there are people who think I should just be allowed to die. Deal with the pain. Go without meds. Because hey, you should have thought of that before you decided to not have money. So few of the health problems in my life have been a matter of my own actions, and yet I’m told that I should be punished for them anyway. Survival of the fittest or some BS. And it’s … yeah. Sad.
Apropos another stupid (and untrue, but others covered that) point: You need to stop speaking in talking points. Only the fact that you are middle class makes this a fucking choice you can even consider.
And Ruby, you fucking asshole, for all your complaints about how important our debt is, and how terrible it is that China has it (L O FUCKING L, let me tell you what), you refuse the single most obvious expedient; tax the rich. Which you insist, absent evidence both from USian history and modern day realities, will make them leave. Yeah, that’s real deficit reduction right there, deny income. Lackwit.
So let’s saythe government takes over the healthcare industry. It will still cost us more than we can afford. We’ll rack up more debt. And who will pay for it? Our children, that’s who.
Oh, and some of you people need to learn to be tollerant of other people’s political views. I disagree with Liberals, but don’t feel the need to hate on them because of it. Sheesh!
Ruby, you’re getting the anger of people who have once and or currently suffered due to your thinking. When you have to choose between rent or a few groceries, when you measure your childs milk each mealtime and when you scrub laundry at midnight until 2 or 3 am and get up at six to start you workday, come and tell me about that fantastic medicaid program. And how easy it was to choose paying rent or the medical bills for the next six months.
The rich. I’d be happy if they paid their actual tax rate, for the moment, but really, they need higher rates, and for them to be enforced.
I thought you were socially liberal?
That’s besides the fucking point. You have stated, loud and clear, that the deaths of my extended family are acceptable to you (Nuclear is safe under government mandated health care of the highest caliber, because he is a civil servant). I do not tolerate those who would harm scores of people – including my family, who while I am not super fucked about them, I would still rather they not die – because you have so much sympathy for the rich (Whom you are apparently pathologically incapable of considering taxing)
You are a coward and refuse to cop to this, but you are nonetheless stating it clearly.
@chocomintlipwax this is entirely off topic (way to break my lurking streak, I know!) — but if you’re near a university/hospital combo, they sometimes offer dental care by the dental students on the cheap
semi on topic — medicaid isn’t anything like guaranteed if you’re poor, you have to also either be a child/parent/pregnant woman or disabled — so no Ruby, just being too poor to buy your own insurance doesn’t get you state coverage (and this would take all of 5 min on wiki to figure out if you cared to actually check your facts)
I despise the US health care system. It’s shameful that our country has decided to ration healthcare based on ability to pay rather than need. Last year’s tornado completely destroyed one of our hospitals, St. John’s Regional Medical Center. Some good samaritans with pickup trucks brought people from the destroyed hospital and the rest of the city over to the other hospital, Freeman West. Many of those people were anxious to go to Freeman because that was out of their network, not a preferred provider. As it turned out, the insurance companies were good enough to “forgive” them for going to an out of network hospital since their own hospital was destroyed. The insurance companies probably knew there would be some bad PR if they had denied those claims, especially with the national media all over the place at the time. How sad is it that after surviving a tornado, so many people were even more afraid of medical bills?
My cousin and his wife just found out their tiny baby has glaucoma and needs several surgeries to avoid going blind. They are insured, but their copay for each eye surgery will cost them $15,000 out of pocket. They will either have to pay off a huge debt over decades or file for bankruptcy and lose almost everything they own. It just makes me sick.
Got any more Faux News talking points, Ruby? The children argument was fucking tired the first time it was trotted out forever ago.
Ruby:
If an ordinary person can’t afford to pay for treatment then all the innovation in the world is worth precisely nothing.
When you say “no social healthcare because of taxes”, we hear “you should die/be in pain because I want a new PS3” or whatever you would spend your tax savings on. Although from what I’ve seen here, it would probably go on that shitty limited private health insurance. National Insurance goes further than private, seeing as it covers every single UK resident, plus any visitors with travel insurance.
Why do you even bother replying when you don’t read anything anyone says? I mean, really, don’t you have better things to do than recite talking points that have already explicitly been debunked in the very posts you’re supposedly replying to? If you have a counterargument, by all means, make it, but just going, “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” seems like a pretty profound waste of everyone’s time.
I will happily tolerate anyone’s political views, as long as they stay just “views.” You can think whatever stupid shit you like in the privacy of your own head. If you want to think really hard about, like, murdering all the redheads in the world, you are perfectly entitled to have those thoughts. But the moment you open your mouth and start advocating it, people are going to explain why policies that kill people are not things anyone should “tolerate.” What you are advocating kills people. I am not okay with killing people. I am not okay with people who support killing people. And I’m pretty damn comfortable with being intolerant of that.
You have the right to free speech. You also have the responsibility of free speech – if you say stuff that’s dumb or offensive, other people are going to use their right to free speech to call you out on it. You can’t just say “free speechy tolerances” as a “get out of gaol free” card.
Good thought and good action comes from good debate, anyway.
You know, you guys have all covered the problems for the poor, but I don’t understand how anyone can consider the US healthcare system to be good even if they’re middle class. Most of my knowledge of the US, and the troubles that residents and citizens face, is from talking to my friends and family out there, who are all thankfully educated middle class (ranging from lower to upper), and I’m horrified by all the thought they have to put into their healthcare.
Canada definitely needs to learn how to make use of it’s immigrant workforce better, especially the medical workforce. My mom’s STILL trying to finish the exams, 7 years later, because she’s expected to relearn almost as much as she had to when getting her degree, most of which she won’t use as a family doctor. And she’s lucky because my Dad’s managed to find well enough paid jobs that she can take the time out to study, a luxury that many don’t have. I met a cardiac surgeon and a neurosurgeon, both Africans, who were driving cabs because they couldn’t afford to sit around studying for the exams. And there are thousands of immigrant medical practitioners that are stuck sitting on their arses because the requirements to enter the medical field here are too challenging for too many parents. But atleast we are all served. I don’t know how my family would have survived if we had been expected to carry medical insurance and personally pay for my education as soon as we arrived. And there’s no way we would have been able to take care of my grandparents without the benefit of our healthcare system,
D’aww, puppies and Muppets! <3
Maybe everything would seem less dire if we could only get a massage.
*Studiously ignores the actual conversation going on*
How do people not consider healthcare to be the LAST thing (along with education) to suffer when you’re in debt? Besides, you seem to be happily blind to the thousands of children that are suffering right now because of this shitty, only-for-the-rich, healthcare system. A story like Kendra’s sister’s is not uncommon. Talk to any cancer patient in the US, and then talk to one from Canada, Australia or the UK (to name a few).
It isn’t all that great for the middle class.
One of the things that grew the middle class in the US after WW2 was unions. Collective bargaining powers kept capital from sucking up all the money and starving labor. This was intolerable to capital because you can’t get as filthy rich as Morgan or Rockefeller when you have to give the people you’re making money off of a fair slice of the pie.
So unions had to go. Capital has always hated unions, and the Cold War and the looming spectre of COMMUNISS gave them lots of weapons to use to bust unions up. One of the biggest victories might be when Reagan busted the air traffic controllers’ unions in the early 80s.
Without going into an in-depth look at the interplay of unions, anti-union sentiment, and the rise and fall of the middle class, here are 11 handy graphs about various performance factors in the U.S. in the 21st Century. Cliff’s Notes: Americans working harder, not earning in proportion to their labor, jobs going overseas, the owners are making mad bank but aren’t hiring.
Another argument I’ve seen levied about how we can’t have single payer: It would put all of the folks in health insurance out of business. It’s an argument that assumes single payer is going to be more attractive to everybody all the time regardless of circumstance. Probably there will be a lot of downsizing, yes, but how about we ask the folks in Our Hat or the folks in the British Isles or the folks on continental Europe about their experiences with single payer instead of clamming up like a toddler asked to eat stewed carrots?
Okay, updating talking points. U.S. Healthcare: It builds character and innovation! Just ignore all the dead, hurting, disfigured, and/or debt-ridden people behind the curtain…
Grow the fuck up, Ruby. I’m so damn sick of you conservatives and your precious delicate feelings.
Shadow said
Actually, it’s my cousin’s baby. I don’t have a sister, but yeah, you’re right about everything else. The baby is already suffering now. His parents are in a bind, because their income is too high to qualify for Medicaid but they can’t afford the copays on their own insurance. I would suggest he and his wife divorce, so he or she could apply for Medicaid as a single parent. They could remarry once the eye surgeries are over and paid for by Medicaid. It would be a hassle but at least they wouldn’t have to lose everything in a bankruptcy. He’s a preacher, though, so he probably wouldn’t go for a plan like that.
@Hippodameia
And I thought we were the ones who were so sensitive and Politically Correct.
Actually if you implement a single payer system in a period of years rather than tomorrow (although tomorrow would be best) along with requirements that allow for people to get care if they need it, you erase the issue of the lay offs in private insurance markets.
Most of the single third party payer systems were created at the beginning of the health insurance market so they never really had private insurers the way that the US did so they never had to deal with the inevitable lost of jobs that our switching over will cause.
That said, we still should have a market for those idiots who want to have oh so special care but the regular Joe would be easily covered for all needs.
@ Maya Lovelace – yeah, somehow it’s always the conservatives who turn on the waterworks when they’re losing. Talking points not working? Just start wailing that anyone who disagrees with you is a big mean poopyhead.