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.
As a canuck I don’t have a family doctor ’cause ya, that’s hard to find, city or rural… but I do have access to clinics, and when I was in pain and didn’t know why there was a number I could call to talk to a nurse* so that I didn’t have to go to the hospital if it wasn’t serious, and when it turned out things were serious the nurse called me an abmulance and got me to the emerg. Four days later I was being operated on by a specialist, and was able to return home the next day to recover.
All in all, the total cost to me personally (not through general taxes) was $45 for the ride to emerg, and $12 for the Tylenol 3s they perscribed. I didn’t have to touch my savings and was able to make a downpayment on a condo later that year and move forward with my life and dreams unaffected.
I have a friend in NYC who was not so lucky and is still paying off his 10K trip to the emerg. for the same surgery. His dreams are on hold because his insurance only covered 40% of the costs.
Yes, there are all kinds of ways that we can improve the system in Canada, but I’ll take my $60 charge over a $10K debtload any day. I might have been one of the people who decided that at 27 and healthy I didn’t need health insurance**, and I would have been wrong, but I don’t want one bad decision to cost anyone their life or their future.
*ok, that’s an Ontario specific government initiative, not available in all of Canada, but imo it’s a really useful service, and from the stats they’ve released has had some effect on reducing unnecessary trips to the emergency room.
**or couldn’t afford it
I’ve worked in healthcare almost my entire working career. I’m in administration now but for a stint of 13+ years, I worked as a phlebotomist in a county hospital. We took the people no one else wanted: the poor and the homeless. All of these assholes who scream about the parasites (i.e. people on welfare), can go fuck themselves. I have seen people literally have to decide between paying rent, or buying food, or paying for a prescription medication that they fucking need to stay alive. These are human beings, not parasites.
I envy the Brits.
A lot of long-term welfare recipients are on welfare due to factors other than being lazy. Long-term illness, lack of jobs in the area (big problem in the UK, most factory jobs have gone), combination of pre-existing conditions and popular work environments (me: I cannot handle the environments of most shops for extended periods of time, and most jobs for people in my educational position are… retail jobs), having a job not being profitable (actual wages earnt worth less than benefits that are revoked; see poverty trap). Most people don’t want to be unemployed. There are a few ‘lazy’ people, but to take away benefits because of them is like saying we should ban paper because of papercuts. In terms of numbers, I could probably make more of a case for banning paper, actually…
Speaking of poverty traps, I recommend reading Nickle and Dimed. It portrays the lives of the working poor (which is the majority of poor) in the US and what it really takes to survive on the wages paid there. It also goes into extensive detail about the very real work and effort minimum wage jobs require and how those jobs are doled out based on race. It could just as easily be applied to the working poor of Canada, as our laws vary in terms of pay and labour laws but aren’t enforced for the lower classes. Especially as few of us can afford to piss our employers off by demanding our rights. The only thing I can say against the book is that its gender skewed as the author was a woman, and so could only report on what she observed or heard from male coworkers. Also, being a white woman closed the door for her in terms of factory work and other hard labour jobs.
RE: Falconer
No, no, I could tell you were not speaking in support of that damn aesop. I sorta blew up and it was tangentially related to what you were talking about, so I addressed it improperly. Sorry about that, I swear, the frustration wasn’t at you!
And on the whole, things are lucky. I have hoarded my savings like Smaug, which means I can afford this without true, bone-deep terror regarding my immediate future. ESPECIALLY since I’m no longer unable to make it to work due to collapse.
Also, re: healthcare
I used to have a joke about the trans youth I chatted with. You could always tell which of ’em were in Europe or Canada, because they were always flabbergasted and horrified that you might have to (gasp) PAY for your surgery!
(Ten months of my wages, or half of my education. And I STILL had to go through a bunch of psych bullshit to do it. OPPORTUNITY IN AMERICA.)
Funny how my comments get twisted. How am I wrong to say that if Americans put more effort into improving their health, it wouldn’t cost so much to insure us? I wasn’t referring to cases where medical problems can’t be helped.
As for the American healthcare system, I’d take it over Canada’s because our’s produces the most innovation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/05/business/05scene.html
The 18th-Century Congress mandated that ship owners buy health insurance for their sailors, and at one point even mandated that every able-bodied citizen obtain a firearm.
The Supreme Court also apparently has held since 1942 that Congress can tell us how much wheat we can grow for our own consumption, as opposed to wheat we grow to sell, because if we kept enough wheat for our own consumption and sold only what we didn’t need, then we would not be buying any wheat and that apparently dampens the wheat market.
Just go read it.
Ruby what you don’t realize is just how much physical effort is put into survivng when you’re poor. We walk far more, we do physically intensive jobs that eventually lead to needing physio we can’t afford and disabiliyty. Ever wash a weeks worth of laundry by hand? Toothpaste….the poor often can’t afford that so brushing teeth gets cut down to once per day or not at all when you aren’t going to work. Long hours at work, long hours doing house chores means lack of sleep just to keep up.
Innovation doesn’t mean shit if you can’t afford to walk into a doctors office for a broken arm or twisted ankle. You do realize that in the US people break limbs and set the bones themselves because they can’t afford a trip to ER right?
I’m not sure how funding medical research and ensuring that everyone has access to healthcare are mutually exclusive. Innovations in medicine are pretty great. I hope the science and practice of treating people continues to improve. However, if you’re too poor to afford healthcare, those innovations aren’t doing you a lick of good.
And again, Ruby, there are more choices than US healthcare or Canadian healthcare. Take a look, maybe, at the NIH.
Ruby, it has been explained in details why improving, or just keeping your health, cost a lot (for example healthy food), and not just effort. Especially if you don’t have enough money for preventive care, it often cost much in the long run.
Saying that people cost too much to be worthed helping when you promote a system in which the poors don’t have the mean of keeping themselves healthy is pretty hypocritical.
>>>She asked me to stop because she was on vacation and she did not want to have to think about difficult things. *rolls eyes*
Spouting on a subject without thinking about it, however, is a quite acceptable way to spend your vacation time.
“All those parasites ought to be left to die.”
“Erm, they’re not parasites.”
“OMG, can’t you leave me be? I don’t want to be discussing controversial subjects during my vacation.”
“Then… why… did… you… start… talking… about it?”
RE: BlackBloc
“Then… why… did… you… start… talking… about it?”
“Because I expected you to agree with me, of course!”
RE: Ruby
Then what, exactly, am I supposed to do in my situation?
Ruby, how do you avoid eating fast food when you live in your car because you can’t afford rent?
Because your statements were ignorant and lacked even a rudimentary knowledge about the health care system, costs, possible savings and pretty much anything about the US or any other health care system.
Oh and that innovation you mentioned? THE GOVERNMENT PAYS FOR MOST OF IT AS A TOTALLY DIFFERENT PART OF THE BUDGET.
RE: Ruby
To clarify: I have savings right now, but savings are finite. If I lose them, what do I do now? How do you KNOW what I have isn’t my fault? How does your system account for me?
I’m glad that I didn’t punch you, metaphorically speaking, and please don’t feel like you have to apologize to me.
I get the impression that American healthcare is far better than a lot of other countries if you are very rich, but far worse for everyone else. It was a shock moving over from the UK to see how many of my reasonably middle class friends were not getting the drugs they needed because they couldn’t afford it. One of the first questions I asked about insurance was how to ensure when you were unconscious you only got taken to the right hospital where you’d have to pay 10% of whatever surgery you needed rather than the standard 50%. I got told you had other priorities in that situation. It is still a very scary system, and I hope I don’t get ill in the time I’m in this country. I really can’t afford to be ill.
Personally, I prefer a healthcare system where I can access the healthcare. Obviously I’d prefer one where the most modern treatments were available, but if I can’t afford it then these treatments are irrelevant to me. I can’t see the system changing in the US. The argument that treating people early is cheaper is fairly irrelevant to the people who make money by providing those people with treatments later.
Medical innovation and technology is one of the coolest things about US medicine…. but that is in spite of our terrible heath-care system, not because of it. The US actually produces a lot of really awesome scientific innovations in all sorts of fields- our shitty health care system doesn’t contribute to those innovations either.
The best, most innovative research in the US, medical and otherwise, generally comes out of federally and privately funded research institutions and universities- these are not dependent on the insurance system for their funding, and would continue to exist and innovate regardless of our health care system.
or what princessbonbon said 🙂
I wasn’t going to see this movie cuz I don’t read the books, but this “doctor” kinda makes me want to see it now.
The US healthcare system builds the most character. And by that, I mean the most opportunities for rich people to be lauded as heroes when they donate to cover the cost of expensive surgeries for some poor ailing child with a heart-of-gold they read about in the Sunday paper.
If our healthcare covered that, how could rich people build character?
/sarcasm
every time i see Faux News Doctor Dude’s last name, i want to put a space between the “A” and the “blow” and add “hard” to the end of “blow.”
Because he is “A Blowhard.”
Because you are ignoring the fact that a lack of “effort” isn’t the problem. You are making illness into a judgment upon people for being bad and lazy and not putting in “effort,” despite the fact that that’s not only stupid and offensive, it’s plain old wrong. Someone who works 16-hour days to put food on the table isn’t refusing to expend “effort” when they don’t get enough sleep, can’t afford the time or money to cook fresh, nutritionally balanced, healthy, vitamin-filled meals, and can’t take time off work to recover from health problems, all of which are incredibly common contributing factors to a lot of illnesses – and they’re definitely not refusing to expend “effort” when they decide not to go to the doctor when they start experiencing symptoms because paying the bill for that visit will mean not having enough money to pay the mortgage or the electricity or the grocery bill, which is precisely the problem people are talking about when we explain the importance of covering preventative care. Even if you are incapable of recognizing that poor people don’t actually deserve to die as some sort of punishment for having the nerve to be poor, you are aware, as you stated previously, that hospitals do not turn people away in dire emergencies.* Those treatments still cost money. Think about the financial ramifications of that. Do you know how much all the costs of, say, amputating the gangrenous feet of someone with severe untreated diabetes add up to? (Hint: It’s a large number!) Now, do you know how much the cost of a doctor’s visit to diagnose and begin treating that patient before their feet start rotting off costs? (Hint: it’s a much, much smaller number!) A single payer system would actually reduce all our costs, because it allows people to go see the doctor when treating them is still comparatively simple and cheap, rather than forcing up your premiums to cover the cost of preventable foot amputations and the like.
I mean, it’s really, deeply sad that “you actually save money by not letting poor people suffer and die” is an argument that even needs to be made, since “letting people suffer and die is not actually an okay thing to do” really ought to be enough for anyone with a functioning capacity for basic empathy, but the fact remains that you are actually paying more money for the privilege of getting to feel superior to poor people by watching them die. Which is, y’know, kind of horrifically disgusting!
*They do frequently bill you afterward, even if you have told them you have no means to pay, and send collections agencies after you to make your life a living hell for years because you dared to think maybe you shouldn’t be left to bleed to death even if you happen to be without income, but that’s a separate problem and not one that’s likely to make much of an impression on someone who appears to believe that those lazy, cheeseburger-eating bastards probably had it coming.