re: #258 HappyWarrior

Well now you got me thinking about a family I grew up near. Kids were allowed to see movies like Braveheart that had a lot of violence but no boobs for them.

It really is a phenomenon with these people. They are perfectly, 100% okay with violence-as-entertainment. But even the slightest hint of human sexuality? Suddenly shit’s not cool. Thing is, it’s not just hardcore religious types either. It extends to every facet of our society.

Video games: Gears of War is a game where you literally chainsaw dudes in half with blood splattering all over the screen, and curbstomp them until their heads are bloody piles of pulp. Rating? M, 17+. Indigo Prophecy (a.k.a. Fahrenheit) is a game with no decapitations or dismemberment, near-zero blood, and almost no violence that the player is engaged in at all (beyond some Matrix-style wire-fu fighting at the end). But the original game has one two-minute scene of “interactive” sex of an entirely non-graphic nature (man on top, overhead view of basically just his back with some audio going on), and that got slapped with Adults Only. They had to remove that scene to be able to sell it on major retail chain shelves.

Movies? Robocop. People getting graphically blown away every couple of minutes, a guy getting melted down by toxic waste and then splattered by a car. Rated R. Now that movie does show a few brief shots of breasts, in that “skirting the censors” quick-pan style as cops are suiting up, but there is no sexuality. If it had had any? Would have been rated X.

re: #261 wheat-dogghazi

One of my older friends emailed me and some other of her friends a series of photos comparing the rough-n-ready Putin hunk with the skinny, edumacated Obama wimp. One shows Putin throwing a guy in a judo match alongside Obama wincing as some martial arts dude slams a guy to the mat.

I just deleted the email, and I refuse to comment back to her. Silence in this case is better than what words I have in mind.

Once again, it just boggles my mind how stupid a person has to be to be incapable of conceiving of alternatives. Now, it’s not the whole reason that I’m working out these days — I just want to take better care of my body than I have in a long time — but one of the side-benefits of it is proving this kind of person dead wrong. You can be a lib’rul, a massive nerd and an IT person and still be physically fit to a high degree.