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Why is American culture so obsessed with violence?

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Stannis
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15 Aug 2014, 1:12 pm

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Lukecash12
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15 Aug 2014, 1:17 pm

Stannis wrote:
Not sure. Violence in entertainment could be a way to socialise the public into an empire which routinely commits acts of aggression, and has an increasingly violent domestic police force. 24 is probably the most blatant example of this.

Possible parallels between modern U.S and ancient Roman, imperialist propaganda?

Quote:
But beneath the veneer of gentility, there was a chilling note of warning. Myths depicted men ripped apart for defying the gods or challenging those who - like the emperors - enjoyed divine protection.

Legends from Rome's past told of enemies vanquished, lands laid waste and thousands sold to slavery.

Christians were eaten alive by half-starved beasts. Rebels and outlaws were burnt at the stake.

And in the amphitheatre, dramas of life-and-death were acted out which symbolised the gulf between friend and enemy, citizen and barbarian, freeborn and slave, loyalist and dissident.

Gladiators fought to the death dressed to mimic historic enemies like Samnites, Gauls and Britons. Christians were eaten alive by half-starved beasts. Rebels and outlaws were burnt at the stake. The arena offered a pageant of 'the war on terror' Roman-style.

Much imperial propaganda consisted of traditional themes endlessly repeated.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/ro ... e_01.shtml


Or it could be because of the products that people purchase and what they choose to watch. American entertainment doesn't all have to be considered propaganda in order to explain it.


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15 Aug 2014, 2:57 pm

We wax violent when someone gets between us and a bacon double cheeseburger. :D


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15 Aug 2014, 3:02 pm

khaoz wrote:
Christianity breeds violence. Shoving the culture of guilt and shame in our face 24/7 creates resentment and hostility. People grow wearly of that and seek ways to outlet the frustrationn


Before 9/11, the largest massacre in American history was the Jonestown massacre. Jim Jones was a militant atheist.


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15 Aug 2014, 4:27 pm

Kurgan wrote:
khaoz wrote:
Christianity breeds violence. Shoving the culture of guilt and shame in our face 24/7 creates resentment and hostility. People grow wearly of that and seek ways to outlet the frustrationn


Before 9/11, the largest massacre in American history was the Jonestown massacre. Jim Jones was a militant atheist.



No he was not. He was a religious leader.

Quote:
James Warren "Jim" Jones (May 13, 1931 ? November 18, 1978) was an American religious leader and community organizer. Jones was the founder and the leader of the Peoples Temple, best known for the mass suicide in November 1978 of 909 of its members in Jonestown, Guyana,[1] and the murder of five individuals at a nearby airstrip, including Congressman Leo Ryan. Over 300 children were murdered at Jonestown, almost all of them by cyanide poisoning.[2] Jones died from multiple gunshot wounds to the head and groin; to this day it is suspected his death was a suicide.

Jones was born in Indiana and started the Temple there in the 1950s. He later moved the Temple to California in the mid-1960s, and gained notoriety with the move of the Temple's headquarters to San Francisco in the early 1970s.


The Jonestown Massacre was religious in nature.



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15 Aug 2014, 4:40 pm

Janissy wrote:
Kurgan wrote:
khaoz wrote:
Christianity breeds violence. Shoving the culture of guilt and shame in our face 24/7 creates resentment and hostility. People grow wearly of that and seek ways to outlet the frustrationn


Before 9/11, the largest massacre in American history was the Jonestown massacre. Jim Jones was a militant atheist.



No he was not. He was a religious leader.

Quote:
James Warren "Jim" Jones (May 13, 1931 ? November 18, 1978) was an American religious leader and community organizer. Jones was the founder and the leader of the Peoples Temple, best known for the mass suicide in November 1978 of 909 of its members in Jonestown, Guyana,[1] and the murder of five individuals at a nearby airstrip, including Congressman Leo Ryan. Over 300 children were murdered at Jonestown, almost all of them by cyanide poisoning.[2] Jones died from multiple gunshot wounds to the head and groin; to this day it is suspected his death was a suicide.

Jones was born in Indiana and started the Temple there in the 1950s. He later moved the Temple to California in the mid-1960s, and gained notoriety with the move of the Temple's headquarters to San Francisco in the early 1970s.


The Jonestown Massacre was religious in nature.


You're pulling the no true Scotsman carx. There's no contradiction between being having atheist followers and having a cult of persona at the same time. Jim Jones even admitted that he used the community to bring people to atheism.

Jim Jones wrote:
Off the record, I don?t believe in any loving God. Our people, I would say, are ninety percent atheist.


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15 Aug 2014, 6:50 pm

Kurgan wrote:
Janissy wrote:
Kurgan wrote:
khaoz wrote:
Christianity breeds violence. Shoving the culture of guilt and shame in our face 24/7 creates resentment and hostility. People grow wearly of that and seek ways to outlet the frustrationn


Before 9/11, the largest massacre in American history was the Jonestown massacre. Jim Jones was a militant atheist.



No he was not. He was a religious leader.

Quote:
James Warren "Jim" Jones (May 13, 1931 ? November 18, 1978) was an American religious leader and community organizer. Jones was the founder and the leader of the Peoples Temple, best known for the mass suicide in November 1978 of 909 of its members in Jonestown, Guyana,[1] and the murder of five individuals at a nearby airstrip, including Congressman Leo Ryan. Over 300 children were murdered at Jonestown, almost all of them by cyanide poisoning.[2] Jones died from multiple gunshot wounds to the head and groin; to this day it is suspected his death was a suicide.

Jones was born in Indiana and started the Temple there in the 1950s. He later moved the Temple to California in the mid-1960s, and gained notoriety with the move of the Temple's headquarters to San Francisco in the early 1970s.


The Jonestown Massacre was religious in nature.


You're pulling the no true Scotsman carx. There's no contradiction between being having atheist followers and having a cult of persona at the same time. Jim Jones even admitted that he used the community to bring people to atheism.

Jim Jones wrote:
Off the record, I don?t believe in any loving God. Our people, I would say, are ninety percent atheist.


I did not know that about him.
The Jonestown Massacre happened when I was a kid. It was all over the American media and was all the adults talked about (I am American). The presentation in the media- and the explanation from my horrified parents- was that this is what can happen when religion goes horribly wrong. He was presented by the media/my parents (who explained what I could only half understand in the media) as what happens when religion goes rogue- steps outside the bounds of formal organized religion. So pervasive was this meme of Jonestown Massacre=rogue religion (and I was an impressionable kid) that it never occurred to me it was anything other than that.



Stannis
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15 Aug 2014, 8:19 pm

Jones was a Communist, and he was also a METHODIST minister.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOv_hSJJ3vo[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIkJkeDPK5Y[/youtube]



Last edited by Stannis on 17 Aug 2014, 3:01 am, edited 5 times in total.

Jacoby
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15 Aug 2014, 8:34 pm

Jim Jones was a sociopath and a nutjob more than anything else



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16 Aug 2014, 8:05 am

Misslizard wrote:
We wax violent when someone gets between us and a bacon double cheeseburger. :D


That's definitely understandable. Great, now I'm hungry. :P

Raptor wrote:
mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:
Raptor wrote:
As promised from earlier:
Raptor wrote:
mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:
Thinking about it now, I think this is the same burning question Micheal Moore had when he made "Bowling for Columbine". I've seen that documentary a few times, though I honestly can't remember the conclusion he came to, if any.

You know what? I'm going to watch that movie since it appears to be on Youtube. I've never seen it before so I won't comment until after I've seen it.

I watched about 40 minutes of it and don't know why I even went that far. Basically the fat man blames our so called "gun culture" :roll: and uses the stupidest examples. He even goes as far as to blame America's foreign policy (mostly military and CIA related operations). He implies that we deserved 9/11. Lockheed Martin's presence in Littleton somehow contributed to the Columbine HS shooting since LMC is a defense contractor. Tell me that's not grasping at straws.
I was going to say that someone without any preordained beliefs should watch it and give an opinion but the documentary (documentary of BS :roll: ) is so slanted that anyone uninformed up to that point would be unable to render an unbiased opinion.
I don't see how you could watch Bowling for Columbine and and be left with any burning questions. He's a peacenik making a rather long winded gunz-r-bad movie and that is really the only conclusion.


You didn't watch the whole thing. :roll: The anti-gun slant is a bit annoying, but IIRC it's not the final conclusion he came to. Then again, it's been years since I've watched it, and I've kind of grown past his documentaries in that span of time. I was kind of a bleeding-heart liberal when I was younger, but nowadays I think both sides of the political spectrum are BS. I consider myself a socialist libertarian; a living, breathing oxymoron if you will. :P


The first 5 minutes (if that long) pretty much set the tone then it just got tedious and filled with the same hyperbole I can find here.


I never said it was a great documentary, and I do agree, it does play into a lot of fear-mongering like much of the mass media. Ironically, when Micheal Moore interviewed Marilyn Manson during one of the scenes, Manson basically made a point about how the US has a culture of fear, and how messed up it is. He's a very sharp guy, albeit with some attention-seeking tendencies, but people often refuse to look past the image he has as this "scary" rockstar, and acknowledge that he's just human like everyone else. As for Moore, liked him when I was younger, don't really care for him now.