It has often been said that the course of a culture can be predicted by its artistic trends. When the dominant art purveyors promote the ideals of malevolent nihilism, should anyone be surprised when impressionable youngsters act on those ideals? If a teenager is bombarded with the notion that values as such are not worth achieving, what options will they feel are left other than to engage in the destruction of values for the sake of that destruction?
Last Friday, Netflix released the first eight minutes of the “Stranger Things” Season 4 premiere as a sneak-peek video ahead of the official launch of Volume 1 this Friday. This opening scene depicts a massacre that involves Millie Bobby Brown’s psychokinetic and telepathic character Eleven and shows the dead bodies of several children covered in blood.
Nothing to aspire too except your own delusions of grandeur..
I have a theory.. How many school shooters were part of the free lunch school program?.. Two sets of books in life.. One on the table and one under.. What exactly are you destroying sir?..
‘Warning this song is extremely powerful in emotional generation!’
https://youtu.be/6Ejga4kJUts
What you see and feel, can’t be undone.
Especially if you’ve been in traumatic events dealing with death and children.
It’s about as good as a label warning on a pack of cigarettes. They tell you the Surgeon General advises you not to smoke. I’m sure that if I’m getting ready to go in and Waffle a School I’m not going to read the velocity or the knockdown power of the 308 ammunition I’m going to kill you with?
I might check the magazine or see if there is a round in the Chamber.
Toronto Ultra Major III tournament June 2-5 …
https://www.callofduty.com/
Killing is a cartoonish pastime. But after a while … virtual killing just doesn’t hack it for the psycho-segment of the gamer community
Sorry Kenji, “video games cause violence!” is another moral panic. Same thing as “guns cause crime!” and pushed by the same people.
You really can’t trust the media, you know?
And before video games, it was Dungeons & Dragons. And before D&D, it was rock music played backwards. And around the same time, it was also the Proctor & Gamble logo on your Crest toothpaste that was turning kids to the Dark Side.
I miss the good old fashioned moral panics. They were so much fun. I remember the evening my mother saw that P&G logo story on the news – she ran right upstairs and flushed all of our toothpaste. And then gave me a lashin’ because I’d never had a cavity, so I was obviously beholden to Satan and his sinister oral hygiene malevolence.
Kenji, the fact your point has often been over-used by activists makes it in no way invalid.
I have been a fan of electronic gaming since it was limited to pinball machines in pool halls, still enjoying it today. I don’t think those without first-hand experience with modern games have a clue what they are even speaking about. I still remember, after playing GTA V steady for a few weeks, I was seriously imagining doing a 180 handbrake turn/parking job in front of work one morning before I caught my senses… and I am a mentally healthy adult(well, kinda).
I came across this video just this past Friday of a mega-popular game that I previously enjoyed, that was so sickening to watch, I eventually shut it off. If you aren’t up to speed on today’s gaming industry, this may help you understand some of the modern concerns. The real fun starts about the 8 min mark…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMa85O-8Zes
If you still feel the same about video games being harmless for all kids after watching this, I would be surprised. Remember, this is even a relatively tame game in today’s market, many others are far worse, giving you free reign to kill, mutilate, slash, torture in near never-ending ways. Even in the western game highlighted, you can hogtie a woman, throw them in a swamp and then watch the alligators chow down, just for starters.
Today’s games are so steeped in realism, submersion and freedom to experiment that I can’t imagine how any weak-minded youngster could NOT be negatively affected. Remember, these kids aren’t watching a movie character shooting a person in the face then stabbing them in the eye with an arrow… they ARE the one deciding to shoot a person in the face and stab them in the eye with an arrow, then the one causing the person to be shot in the face then stabbed in the eye with an arrow. Big difference, IMO.
Not saying video games are evil, but with the weakened sensibilities of today’s youth, only a fool would choose to believe today’s deeply immersive and insanely violent games are harmless.
For the record … I’m a libertarian (small l). I don’t really think much of banning things. But gaming can become dangerously addictive and mind numbing … not to mention encouraging other more deadly personality defects. All I meant to suggest is that that compulsive video gaming in fantasyland might not be so healthy. And when a psycho-loner-high school dropout spends countless hours killing people “virtually” … he may have the defective gene which causes him to play out his dark fantasies on small school children … like the ones who used to “bully” him … because he was a psycho-loner freak all the way back in elementary school.
The people close to this latest elementary school shooter … are societies FIRST Responders. Mom, dad (ha ha ha ), grandma, and grandpa … need to have their eyes and ears on their psycho-progeny. Yes … THEY were the ones who needed to give us all FAIR warning.
Just had this on my turntable … which kinda describes the psyche of this child murdering psycho-loser in TX. Yeah … it’s a world of pain … just outside his window. Most of us face up to it and make our lives better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQnGOezyKnw
Hey! That’ll be enough of you trashin’ the Ontario NDP Leader’s son!
https://www.thespec.com/news/hamilton-region/2011/10/06/horwath-s-son-wears-t-shirt-touting-women-hating-song.html
I believe we are on the same page, Kenji. Sorry, my previous reply to you kinda morphed into a lecture/lesson for those so easily poo-pooing the concept you had just put forth. Ha, you were probably wondering what I was badgering you for. Anyways, I was merely trying to add some depth and 2022 context to your point.
Violent video games can be a problem, yes, but then there is just such a bizarre myriad of mental health threats that modern kids face today, like…
… their teachers, for just a start.
Most of this social decay is resulting from the left’s systematic wars against the intact family, community cohesion and religion. And the politically correct sheeple of every partisan bent have celebrated the long, slow decline every step of the way. I sure hope there is a road back for all of us.
If video didn’t change your mind, advertisers wouldn’t pay to be there.
Back to blaming movies and video games? Really???
RE – video games:
Let’s look at it this way: who is the baby-sitter for lazy parents for whom raising children was an after-thought at best?
I’m not saying blame video games but you can blame the people who put their kids in front of them and calling it a day on the “adulting” front.
I think parents that allow schools to dope their kids up on Ritalin and the like, and the rise of “anti-depressants”, etc, hold more of the blame.
Then there are the helicopter parents, scared to let their kids enjoy childhood, and other equally insidious modern trends.
Allow???? My DIL was told if she didn’t put her kid on drugs they would take him away and put him in foster care. As soon as she started the drug the kid had a grand mal seizure. Oh guess what? The school misdiagnosed his medical problem and the pediatrician let the school diagnose him. He wasn’t ADHD. He was epileptic. So don’t blame the parents. The neurologist said the ADHD meds turned petit mal seizures into grand mal and he was three years recovering.
Bingo.
It all starts at home.
This degeneration of Western art has been going on for a long time. Arguably since the Dadaists of the 1920s, but certainly since the 1960s.
Pretty much down to the Long March. Leftists pervert art and make it propaganda. Mainstream Western art is all propaganda, all the time. Books, movies, public art is all designed by and for Leftists, to push their narrative of how life is. Which leads to more/bigger/better government, which works worse and worse.
I don’t watch their propaganda. I don’t listen to their music. I don’t read their books. And I’m here to tell you, it is a relief to give my poor brain a rest from the tsunami of bullshit and violent images.
I’m not going to watch Stranger Things. I’m not going to watch the trailer for it. Because I don’t need to see that. I’m missing -nothing- by giving it a hard pass.
Netflix knows this. They can see it in their daily data uptake. They can see it in their stock price too, as people who don’t want to see dead children on television cancel their subscriptions.
What do do about this cultural phenomenon? WRITE YOUR OWN. You got a problem with the sh1tty stories they push? Go tell your own story. That’s what I do. This whole blog is Kate McMillan telling her story, her way. She’s better at it than I am, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have my own.
Arguably since the Dadaists of the 1920s, …
Yup.
Phantom, I suspect you are right This does indeed go back quite some time. Don’t forget to leave out the impact of Post-Modernism.
And it should be noted that for the first time ever, Netflix is losing subscribers this year. A quarter million of them in the first quarter alone, and they expect to lose several million before year end. And given the swill put out on network television, there’s no reason to expect people will be returning there either.
Hollywood is run by perverts and self-hating Jews cast out of the Jewish community for apostasy (or perversion) who outdo each other in their contempt for Christian and Jewish morality.
Of course they do everything in their power to oppose Christian and Jewish morality. There would be no place for them in a world where that morality was taken seriously.
There would, of course, be no place for them either in a world governed by the principle that the Han Chinese are the master race. But they never openly oppose Chinese supremacy (sorry, “Confucian morality”). It makes no sense from a business standpoint—and they are thrilled at the notion that the Chinese hate Christianity as much as they do.
Many are quite proud of their flat chested Chinese trophy wives too. About as non-kosher as it gets—and it’s easier to pretend they’re buggering a ten-year-old while in bed with their beards, trying to sire a Chinese heir.
Oh, for the love if…Stranger Things is every 1980s nerd movie for and starring kids in a blender, with particular emphasis on Stephen King’s The Shop stories.
Season 4 is just the Carrie ripoff. It’s not aimed at today’s kids or teenagers, it’s aimed at 40-year-old nerds wallowing in nostalgia because they refuse to grow up. To the extent there’s any correlation here, it’s that 40-year-old nerds who refuse to grow up make shitty parents and raise shitty children.
I was a huge fan of Stephen King’s writing, til he displayed his near DeNiro levels of TDS.
His works, as he is, are dead to me now. And that is from someone who read The Stand thrice and even finished his Dark Tower series. Yup, he may now be a full-blown asshole, but there s no denying he was an exceptional story teller.
When you find out warning labels attached to CDs and on movies don’t do jack shit.
I’m old enough to remember Marylyn Manson giving a “Who…little ol’ me?” and “artistic expression” as an excuse for his contribution to mass death at schools…Columbine for those who don’t remember.
So they went after the producers and owners of the record labels…*ahem*… Edgar Bronfman in this case, but that kind of fell on deaf ears. Never get between a buck and an ex bootlegger I guess.
Anyways…enjoy the decline everyone.
Values, schmalues. We need a return to virtues. Postmodern liberalism is the road to perdition.
Further – The same ones who led the charge to ban the violence in Road Runner cartoons didn’t have it in them to take on the industry’s heavy hitters who were really doing the damage.
Sadly, too little too late for ACME ANVILS.
When the power goes out…
There’s going to be an awful lot of pissed off kids and kid wannabes.
Cities wouldn’t be the place you’d want to go to.
Our politicians and mainstream media never look at the overpopulation growth in these areas…
Just the white racists are to blame.
It’s not video games or the media. It’s SSRI’s. Look at the rates of prescriptions, the side effects and when school shootings started becoming more prevalent. Correlation isn’t causation but…..
Peter Hitchins agrees with you. You can catch an half hour of him talking with Mike Graham on TalkTV every Monday, or read his column each week in The Mail on Sunday (That’s the Sunday edition of the Daily Mail in the UK)
I do not understand all this navel gazing self examination and the pat self effacing answers about how we need to do something as a society. The killer was a deeply disturbed mentally ill child/man who had a long history of abusive and aggressive behaviour. He was hispanic and so could not be treated for his antisocial behaviour because they were already up to their quota for his race within the school system. It is a repeat of the Nikolas Cruz/Florida shooting.
The issue here is not what is wrong with society. The issue is why can’t we do something when we identify a teenager in serious trouble obviously going down the wrong path straight towards violent antisocial behaviour and incarcerate and treat him? We used to do that. When did we stop and why did we stop?
It was stopped in the Western world in the ’70s because the new progressive mantra for mental health was not lock them up as it was just a medical problem. Hence the psychiatric homes/hospitals were emptied and now we have streets and schools flooded with mental health problems; we cannot even demand someone take their meds.
And THAT is the root cause of the problem, not art, video games, not songs. Most kids go through their life exploring dark stuff and never turn into school shooters. I listened to Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper. I never shot up a school.
No, but we can facilitate their bad habits with “harm reduction” policies. Here! Have another jab! On us!
But you know… “Science”, and the “Experts” had all this figured out. We should trust them!
Yes, that was sarcasm! BIG time!
No surprize that the progs encourage nihilism; they probably secretly cheered when the latest massacre happened because it gives them yet another opportunity to disarm the American people. I am always not surprized to hear the person was known, issued warnings, was on the police radar, under medical attention, on drugs/antidepressants.
I think we make things too complicated.
1. Take all the killings
2. Subtract gang-on-gang murders
3. Subtract terrorist killings
4. Subtract people with serious mental health issues
What do you have left? Probably a few innocent bystanders. So why not isolate and address each problem?
Hollywood and the death culture of today’ love the shooting, the blood, the mayhem.
When they start fake apologizing preamble, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s just for public consumption. It basically is ‘but’,
As many may know, ‘but’ negates everything that preceded it.