Monday, 17 December 2012

Right-Wing Bloggers Exploit CT Massacre to Attack... a Movie Studio.

Egh. So much for otherwise sitting this one out...

"Conservative" astroturfing outfit Breitbart.com doesn't like Jaime Foxx, and definitely don't like that he's the star of Quentin Tarantino's about-to-be-huge slavery-revenge epic "Django Unchained" - a movie they've been trying to "take down" ever since it was announced (for obvious reasons.) They're current tactic? Exploiting the tragedy and Sandy Hooks to attack the film and it's producers over movie violence.


Typically, this sort of thing would be ignorable - craven opportunists doing what they do. Unfortunately, for a variety of the "violent games and movies are part of the problem" refrain seems to resonate lots of otherwise-intelligent, progressive people as well... which is, of course, music to the ears of the gun lobby - who would much prefer the easy targets of the entertainment industry take the fall instead of them.

These are the times when intellectual clarity is needed, but also intellectual fortitude. Rational, thinking people can agree, disagree or compromise over what to do about guns; but no person can be called rational or thinking who buys into the absurd falsehood of "violent" media as a direct contributor to real-life violence - no matter how simple and comforting the myth may be.

We know what the real problems are. We know what the real problems are not. From there, we can arrive at what's to be done. Everything else is white noise.

No comments:

Post a Comment