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.
Keith Ablow collaborated on a book with Glenn Fuckingg Beckk. ’nuff said.
Thank you.
I did a ton of research into this in 2004 when I was *mumble mumble* against *mumble mumble* and the upshot is, a single third party payer system would be the most efficient method of delivering care for the US and would even cut down on tort claims (most of those are because someone has to pay for the long term care of someone injured by a negligent doctor or nurse.) And it would save so much money that one could have almost Cadillac care for everyone in the US nearly right away.
And Paul Krugman has been hocking a single third party payer for nearly as long as I have so even if someone does not want to believe moi, a random internet stranger, believe a Nobel Prize winning economist who has done the same research.
Damn you DSCC for not using my slogan of Medicare for All, Good Enough for Grandma, Good Enough for You!
Not like the gung-ho action girl is a new trope.
Has Ablow seen any sci-fi, or even been to the theater at all in the past 35 years?
So can I just suggest that people stop saying “I’ve been reading a lot about this” before airing ignorant opinions? It implies that you either are lying, read nothing but other people’s delusional ramblings, or have the reading comprehension of a snail.
Ruby, have you figured out the monetary value of my life yet? I’m still waiting over here. I’m over here being all obese and on medicaid and shit, come on, I want to know. While you are at it, you could give me figures for my sister’s babies. They are five, two, and three months old.
Er, judicial review isn’t a bad thing per se. There are a lot of good reasons we have judicial review and don’t just let the congress do whatever it likes.
Also, I think this area of law (how far the Commerce clause expands and how directly something must be related to the flow of interstate commerce) is one of the few where you can make a solid legal argument for “conservative” view, i.e. the more limiting reading of the commerce clause. The commerce clause was construed pretty narrowly up until the 20s and 30s and there have been cases deemed to go “too far” since then too. Personally, I find the weird federal-state divide that the US has to be unnecessary and somewhat silly, but there are those who think otherwise. I don’t think arguing for a limited commerce clause is one of those patently absurd conservative arguments
Meriken Exceptionalism never failst o amuse. Except that it does, all the time.
ACTIVIST JUDGES is by far the most contentless whinge ever created. Yes, judges will be informed by their political philosophy in making judgements of what’s constitutional – The USA is so steeped in worship of its founders that it’s extraordinarily rare to not think ‘they’d agree with me if they were born with me now’. When you have a document as vague as the US Constitution, this means the people who have final say on what’s ‘constitutional’ are going to have to do a lot of interpretation and frankly whole-cloth creation.
So basically what we should do is build a time machine and bring one of the founders back and have them meet the current Supreme Court bench.
Just for laughs mind.
I’m amused “adrenaline junkies” ended up in there. I know when I cracked a bone in my hand falling on the ice in college it was because I wanted to live life TO THE XTREEEEME!
Well said. For the record I’m not disputing that, just pointing out the hypocrisy. I grew up with conservatives using “activist judges” as a dogwhistle for SATANIC CRIMINAL LOVER for most of my life.
Um. That would be quite a laugh. At least the look of horror on both sides as they realize what was originally meant and how it ended up.
Considering they were arguing over the meaning within weeks of writing the damn thing, I doubt that even the entire set of delegates to the Constitutional Convention would be surprised at how it ended up.
Well, the reason the constitution is elastic is that the founders, uh, disagreed. Drastically. The constitution was nearly not passed for a number of reasons, and that’s one of them. It’s a compromise document, so when I say you can read what you’d like into it, I’m not kidding.
Democrats will drag the phrase out too, because nobody has the guts to admit that it doesn’t work that way.
if I may use some Team America humor…
Republicans are assholes.
Democrats are pussies.
Libertarians pretend to be the dicks that will solve everybody’s problems but are really very big, hairy assholes.
The only dicks I know are anarchists.
I don’t put monetary value on anyone’s life.
As for healthcare for the poor, we have Medicaid, there’s the CHIP, and no public hospital can turn away people because of their inability to pay.
Yes, prevention would greatly reduce medical costs, but good luck getting people to give up their cigarettes and fast food.
Again, I don’t think if the government took over the health care industry there would ever be enough money to take care of all of us. And when the government pays for stuff, people try to get as much as they can. Pretty soon we’d have a doctor lottery like Canada. No thanks.
You are aware that a) Medicaid funding is cut at every opportunity, b) there’s a huge gap of incomes between “poor enough to be on Medicaid” and “rich enough to afford (or have a job that provides) good health coverage”; c) Medicaid coverage varies drastically by state wealth; d) public hospitals still charge the poor people who show up at their ERs, saddling them with crushing debt; d) prevention includes things besides adopting healthy lifestyles such as routine check-ups, prescription medications to control serious health problems, and vaccinations; e) the statements “I don’t think if the government took over the health care industry there would ever be enough money to take care of all of us” and “I don’t put monetary value on anyone’s life” are thematically contradictory; f) while imperfect, Canadian healthcare manages to serve its entire population; g) there are other nations with universal coverage that do a better job of it than Canada; and h) if I wanted to, there’s enough FAIL in your post for me to make it all the way through the Roman alphabet and well into the Greek?
First of all, a lot people can’t afford to eat healthy food.
Second, among the many things that can contribute to weight gain are depression, stress and sleep deprivation. People don’t suffer these things by choice. So if you’re trying to tell me that my need for preventative medicine is due to laziness or greed, then with all due respect, fuck you.
Who runs medicaid? Isn’t medicaid hellish evil of evil government run? The HORROR!
Every time you talk about how people’s survival and programs that help them survive are too fucking expensive, you do exactly that.
Yeah, because that oversimplistic fool ass pile of nonsense relates to reality…except in how it totally fucking doesn’t.
Do you think I’m fat because I eat too much fastfood? Do you think people eat a lot of fastfood out of fucking joy for it? Fuck you, fatphobic classist asshole.
Other MRA complaints we can expect to see about The Hunger Games:
– Encourages teenage girls to leverage their sexuality in order to wheedle burn salve and soup parachutes out of hardworking betas.
– Presenting a horrifying dystopia in which their are no FOREIGN BRIDES because every woman on the planet is a Panemiskank.
– Acting like a woman having her tongue cut out is some kind of BAD thing HUHUH AMIRITE FELLAS?
– Confuses young men by combining positive, manly traits such as murderousness and negative, nancy-boy traits such as liking flowers in the same character.
– Games biased against male tributes due to hard seating on the transport hovercraft.
Well, I’m fat because of one of my medications. But if I didn’t have health insurance (which I won’t if I can be denied because of a pre-existing condition when I turn 26) I wouldn’t be able to afford it, which would probably solve the problem just fine for Ruby.
I agree with what darksidecat and dracula said just above. I also want to point out another problematic assumption in Ruby’s comment. I have high cholesterol. I inherited it from my mother. My mother exercises every day, and eats a diet that consists mainly of raw vegetables. In spite of that, she has high cholesterol, and has had a heart attack and bypass surgery. (For most of her life, she had no preventative care.)
I am not as virtuous as my mother, but I also exercise every day, don’t eat junk food, and watch my diet carefully. And I still have high cholesterol. So, preventative care, which I am privileged to have access to because I have insurance, plays a huge role in keeping me healthy and out of the hospital. My own actions play very little role. Certainly, things would be worse if I didn’t take good care of myself, but taking good care of myself by itself would not be enough to avoid expensive hospital stays.
In addition to the huge barriers many people face in trying to live a more healthy lifestyle, there are also people who are genetically predisposed to certain health problems no matter what they do personally. Ruby’s position ignores BOTH extremely important aspects to public health.
@steph: – Games biased against male tributes due to hard seating on the transport hovercraft.
Bahaha. Thank you. Sometimes you just need a laugh.
Also because they seem to enjoy taking credit for other people’s work.
Drastically underserving the present population because of limits placed on it by evil fuckwits like you.
Are you stupid or dishonest? Because this only applies to abject emergencies, and they still saddle you with the bill.
That much is obvious.
Maybe, if we keep up the war in afghanistan and massive military expenditures besides, AS WELL AS letting the rich pay out less than the poor. Then we might have a problem.
Seriously, why are we talking about the Affordable Care Act? It’s apropos of nothing, and Ruby is repeating Fox News talking points verbatim and clearly couldn’t form an original opinion to save his/her life.
Wow. I love it when people share their opinions on issues without having the faintest idea what the fuck they’re talking about.
When we talk about the importance of preventative care, we don’t actually mean “lulz, fat people are fat, they should stop that.” We are talking about things like treating high blood pressure before someone has a stroke, or treating depression before someone blows half their head off, or treating an infected wound before it becomes a gangrenous limb requiring amputation, or treating a sore throat before it becomes a sore throat and bronchitis and pneumonia. But I suppose it’s somewhat more challenging to feel terribly superior to people with those conditions than it is to preen about not eating cheeseburgers. (Because fat people are totally just eating fast food all the time, right? Silly fat people! Too bad they’re not enlightened like you!)