Stop beating a dead horse…

Have you actually played a GTA game much before, Poita? I only ask because I’ve been enjoying them ever since the original came out, and beating up random pedestrians is truly the most pointlessly tedious way of accumulating money in the series they’ve ever created. It’s one of those things that only Daily Mail readers trying to be shocked seem to bother doing; you can earn as much running Taxi or Fire Dept. jobs in 5 minutes as you can commiting random violence in an hour.

Oh it’s a hard life when you are ‘forced’ by others to exercise your index finger and give the scroll wheel on your mouse a couple of spins eh, i bet it ruins your whole week. Poor you.

Taking your analogy: It is in fact culture that is the tree that grows from the soil of humankind, not the other way round. (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/culture) The people are foul and corrupt, and the culture it’s reflection. Although art can be a pure fruit it is often bitter and all the better for it.

Anyway, on the topic of this post and the Craig Conundrum. Your linguistic linking of homosexuality to incurable diseases such as blindness, and curable afflictions is inconsistent and discriminatory. As I’ve indirectly mentioned the Nazis on the other post and thus forfeited this internet argument, I may as well go the whole hog (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_eugenics). I’m sure you’ll find many people happy to discuss this with you in greater depth. Good luck with that xx

Dbot. If losing Shakespeare were the price of having promotional paedophilia out of mainstream media then i’d consider that to be acceptable.
I’ve read and studied a few Shakespear plays. I’m more familiar with Othello than R&J. (still can’t figure out if the O man did Iago’s office in a carnal sense or not. I guess he did for him to be that pissed off) I confess that i didn’t know that Juliet was 13. In an age where most people didn’t make it to 40 though you could say that people had to do a lot of growing up and fast. 13 could be considered of weddable and beddable age to people back then. I don’t think the objections of the capulets or montagues or whoever Juliets parents were was one of age but rather clanish enmity.
But yeah, seeing as you ask, their age is way too disparate and low on her part.
I have watched and enjoyed both versions of the movie ‘Lolita’. I understand why there, or at least the first one, were controversial. However, i think there is a massive difference when a medium treats the subject of something such as paedophilia as a cautionary tale or even a character study such as maybe in the movie ‘the woodsman’ with Kevin Bacon. That particular movie was accused of ‘humanising’ the character. I thought that was stupid because Paedophilia is a sickness and it is a sickness that some humans have so we should understand them. The irony is that some abusers were themselves victims at an earlier age so the sympathy we have for the child victim, say in a movie, would turn to hatred if there were a sequel as they would maybe now be an adult and commiting the crime. I actually stopped watching that movie as frankly i was just a bit bored of it and i find that as i get older i’m unwilling to spend time on a movie if it’s not captivating. The Ray winstone movie ‘The war’ was brutal and nasty. That showed an even worse kidn of paedophillia (if that be possible) as it was from the girls father. At least it also was a horrible but cautionary tale too.
Again, it’s not the subject matter that i object to. It’s the gloryfication and especially the inciting nature of it when it comes to garbage such as Sergey song.

People use this argument about if something is art then it’s untouchable as if that is a battle that is already won. Well it is with many people but not with me. i don’t accept that premise.
I hate nazis and as a christian (albeit one who dislikes organised religion and who attends mosques and budhist temples) i have soft spot for the Jews so i’m certainly not anti semetic but i am pissed off that people are being arrested, deported to germany and imprisoned because they happen to have the opinion that the holocaust was exaggerated in numbers. Once again, i think these guys who deny the holocaust have ulteria motives and are basically either nut jobs or scum bags but really? Germany can reach out across the world and have people from other nations arrested by their own governments and shipped off to be locked up? This happened recently when an Australian guy visited the Uk.
The reason i mention this is that I truly believe in free speech. These scum bags should have the right to speak their nonsense. However, if they spoke with an aim to glorify the murder of the jews or to incite it then i would have no problem with the authorities taking steps against them.

This idea that words, media or culture are harmless is silly. If i said that great culture can inspire someone to want to be a better person, even to encourage them to do good, to try harder and to take on the mindset that was put forward in the movie/book/game etc then thaht would make sense right. It’s a kind of ‘incitment’ to do better, to be a better person. It doesn’t make them do good things and it doesnt make them be a better person but it can stongly inspire them and encourage them to adopt that positive, humanity serving mindset.
Then why can’t negative and evil culture have the same effect for it’s onwn particular sentiment? Of course it can. yeah in GTA a kid caving an innocent woman head in with a baseball bat on the street and getting a cash reward programed to appear from her purse as blood pools around her head doesn’t ‘make’ him then go out and do the same thing in real life. it does however, if constantly fed to him all throughout his formative years via various media, strongly guide and shape his mindset and although it doesnt make him become a bad person it does make it more likely that he will make bad choices.
If you grow up being taught by your media role models and heroes to think of women as bitches and hoes then your treatment of women in the real world is indeed going to be impacted. Many will snap out of it but some won’t. Some might have gone that way anyway but some who do go bad, if instead had been fed inpiring culture rather than denegrating and victimising culture, just might have been inspired to the light side a second chance.
Subtle influences are just as significant a factor on things than are direct ones.

I’m sorry but everytime some evil, inciteful culture surfaces it’s just simplistic to say that it doesn’t ‘make’ people do bad things.
As the poem goes ‘be carful of what fruit you eat, who knows upon what soil they fed’.
Culture is soil, society is the tree that lives and feeds on that soil and every new generation of young adults is the seasonal fruit that the tree produces. As the wise saying goes. You know a tree by it’s fruit. A tree can only produce healthy fruit from healthy soil. Poisonous soild will result in rotten and bitter fruit.
You are what you eat and food for thought is absorbed by the mind and heart as surely as food for the belly is absorbed and becomes part of our body.