Time Heals All Wounds.. And Then Kills the Patient
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Evening
Evening
Tue Sep 5 15:54:42 2006
Unknown Film Festival

An insight -- there's a common criticism of conservatives that they protest sex in films but not violence. The criticism is not in fact based on common values -- there are two problems with it. From conservative positions:

  1. Violence is something that occasionally needs to happen in defense of society, and when it does, it may as well happen in public to disencourage whatever the violence was about. Sex, by contrast, is a private matter, not something to be glorified in films in a way that diminishes its proper context (that is, between married folk).
  2. Desensitisation to violence is a fantasy, and could not be adopted by society without great effort. Lack of sexual mores, by contrast, poses a real threat to the conservative outlook
I don't hold with that conservativism, but that argument against it seems to be broken.

I've been irritated recently at the chutzpah of Americans who complain about some hostages held in Persia around the time of the Islamic revolution, not understanding that the United States (and Britain) held that entire nation hostage, killing many of its leaders and orchestrating fall after fall of its government, all for lucre. The hostage taking should not have happened, but in the greater scheme of things, it's nothing.