Finally, a good Book of Mormon movie...

[cinepro]

This is how it's done. 

The Battle of Jershon

My wife suggested they play this on BYU TV between conference sessions, but I think she overestimates the average conference viewer's tolerance for artistic license.

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

Yeah, let's glamorize child soldiers and snipers and automatic weaponry and super awesome explosions, all done in the name of God. 

Because there just aren't enough school shootings and terrorist attacks. 

*barf*

[Tacenda]

2 minutes ago, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

Yeah, let's glamorize child soldiers and snipers and automatic weaponry and super awesome explosions, all done in the name of God. 

Because there just aren't enough school shootings and terrorist attacks. 

*barf*

I agree!  It seems that boys will be boys, to men will be boys also.  Playing war, and writing about war, seems to be a passion for some boys/men.  I wonder about the wars in the Bible and BoM and how real they were.  Something just seems off.  

[cinepro]

13 minutes ago, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

Yeah, let's glamorize child soldiers and snipers and automatic weaponry and super awesome explosions, all done in the name of God. 

Because there just aren't enough school shootings and terrorist attacks. 

*barf*

That reminds me of the story of my older sister trying to raise my nephew in a violence and gun-free household, with no violent cartoons or movies (the scriptures excepted, of course).  When he was four or five, he was eating toast and after a few bites noticed it looked like a gun, and commenced chasing his sisters around the house pretending to shoot them with his "toast-gun".

[Meadowchik]

29 minutes ago, cinepro said:

That reminds me of the story of my older sister trying to raise my nephew in a violence and gun-free household, with no violent cartoons or movies (the scriptures excepted, of course).  When he was four or five, he was eating toast and after a few bites noticed it looked like a gun, and commenced chasing his sisters around the house pretending to shoot them with his "toast-gun".

I have fraternal girl/boy twins which has made abundantly clear how different children, including girls and boys; can be.

But I still abhor glamourised violence.

[Vanguard]

1 hour ago, cinepro said:

This is how it's done. 

The Battle of Jershon

My wife suggested they play this on BYU TV between conference sessions, but I think she overestimates the average conference viewer's tolerance for artistic license.

I'm ambivalent on this type of thing. On the one hand, I have little tolerance for packaging such violence within the standard, safe confines of "warriors for God" storytelling and on the other, I take very seriously the idea that putting on the "armor of God" at some future point may well be more than just a commentary on our spiritual well-being. We will need future literal warriors and these re-enactments are the type of thing to keep this reality fresh in our minds.

[BlueDreams]

56 minutes ago, cinepro said:

That reminds me of the story of my older sister trying to raise my nephew in a violence and gun-free household, with no violent cartoons or movies (the scriptures excepted, of course).  When he was four or five, he was eating toast and after a few bites noticed it looked like a gun, and commenced chasing his sisters around the house pretending to shoot them with his "toast-gun".

Lol! My Bros are a bunch of violence loving Texans. A couple of christmas' ago, my one brother got air soft guns with these tiny plastic pellets. I found them in the backyard with my then 5 year old brother shooting at my brother (9 yr old) with a large gun as the older boy tried to run and dodge him. He was a surprisingly good shot and the 9 year old would scream out Owe! every few seconds. The 9 year old, unfortunately, got the crappier gun and stunk at aiming. I still love the un-PC pic I have of my littlest bro holding a gun and smiling big, so happy to be shooting his older brother. 

For the record, I don't own a single gun and don't plan to any time soon. I wasn't the biggest fan of the youtube video, because of the depictions....but I still sent it to my bros. Because, why not. The older ones watched walking dead on easter. I pointed out that is not the resurrection we're going for here. Gentility and correctness isn't exactly their strong suit. And anything to get those boys looking at scriptures I'll take. Of all the things I know a number of them are exposed to by 16, this is the least of my concerns.

 

With luv,

BD

 

[bluebell]

1 hour ago, cinepro said:

That reminds me of the story of my older sister trying to raise my nephew in a violence and gun-free household, with no violent cartoons or movies (the scriptures excepted, of course).  When he was four or five, he was eating toast and after a few bites noticed it looked like a gun, and commenced chasing his sisters around the house pretending to shoot them with his "toast-gun".

I have had my two year old do the same thing with a graham cracker and a piece of life cereal. There is just something about boys and guns. 

[stemelbow]

I was expecting something funny to happen all the way to the end. 

Talk about disappointment.  I don't see anything good in this video at all. 

[bcuzbcuz]

2 hours ago, cinepro said:

This is how it's done. 

The Battle of Jershon

My wife suggested they play this on BYU TV between conference sessions, but I think she overestimates the average conference viewer's tolerance for artistic license.

Useless! A waste of time with a message of mush.

[The Nehor]

I do not think the Book of Mormon glamorizes war as such. It can if read lightly but the war chapters in Alma are a slog of endless marching and cities taken and retaken. The whole thing seems almost boring. There is no climactic battle. The Lamanites just give up and stop fighting and then go home when their morale falls. In Mormon  they leave out descriptions of the carnage intentionally to keep us from being harrowed up.

We like to make a big deal about the stripling warriors and their miraculous survival but by the end all of them were wounded. How many lost limbs and/or years of their life?

All that being said I have a fascination with warfare. I played with guns as a boy and still indulge in war gaming (two Sunday's ago I got to be Napoleon invading Russia in the winter. I won). On top of that I practice unarmed fighting at least twice a week. There is something noble in fighting for a cause that a lot of men eat up. Within certain bounds it is healthy. I want to believe I would have the courage to fight to defend a sister, a girlfriend, a nephew, a niece, or whoever if push came to shove. Downside is some people take it too far. I have met survivalists who would never admit it but they secretly hope the government collapses and that they can play with their guns and be important and saved from the perceived drabness of their lives.

[Tacenda]

10 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

I do not think the Book of Mormon glamorizes war as such. It can if read lightly but the war chapters in Alma are a slog of endless marching and cities taken and retaken. The whole thing seems almost boring. There is no climactic battle. The Lamanites just give up and stop fighting and then go home when their morale falls. In Mormon  they leave out descriptions of the carnage intentionally to keep us from being harrowed up.

We like to make a big deal about the stripling warriors and their miraculous survival but by the end all of them were wounded. How many lost limbs and/or years of their life?

All that being said I have a fascination with warfare. I played with guns as a boy and still indulge in war gaming (two Sunday's ago I got to be Napoleon invading Russia in the winter. I won). On top of that I practice unarmed fighting at least twice a week. There is something noble in fighting for a cause that a lot of men eat up. Within certain bounds it is healthy. I want to believe I would have the courage to fight to defend a sister, a girlfriend, a nephew, a niece, or whoever if push came to shove. Downside is some people take it too far. I have met survivalists who would never admit it but they secretly hope the government collapses and that they can play with their guns and be important and saved from the perceived drabness of their lives.

Thanks for being so honest Nehor!  I know you're right, I have relatives that play these war games and they're married with children.  My son was addicted to COD, luckily not anymore.  I have a nephew on my husband's side that inferred that he believes the world will end in about 5 years. Maybe he's of the same mindset, since he's accumulating weapons.  Maybe it's in boys' DNA, I guess that's a good thing to a point.  But in this video it was too harsh, with real looking gun fire.  Why not just pellets or something?  

Edited May 10, 2016 by Tacenda

[morgan.deane]

I talk about this a bit in the introduction to my first book, Bleached Bones and Wicked Serpents: Ancient Warfare in the Book of Mormon.  

Warfare is generally dismissed out of hand in liberal and academic circles, and this has filtered out through society. My daughter for example told me she isn't allowed to play cops and robbers because that involves guns.  I pointed out that cops are here to save and protect us, so its no the gun that is the problem, but how a person uses it, and the desires of their heart that matters.    I don't worry when my daughter wants to play cops and robbers because its a good way to teach basic versions of the positive and negative qualities associated with war.  Warfare teaches concepts like honor, justice, duty, courage, and sacrifice, especially when you are reading about them in scriptures, service academies or other peace time venues. Of course there are negatives about war that include sexual violence, child soldiers, blood lust, and rage.  The BoM contains both of these examples, so as Nehor said above, the BoM is an extremely complex book on the subject and its difficult to simply say its one or the other.  Though I think that even if you can point to justifications for war, I think that even victory is ultimately futile as I wrote here and expanded in my second book: http://mormonwar.blogspot.com/2015/01/futile-victory-in-jacob-726.html

About the video in question, I thought it was kind of cute.  In its essential form, warfare, particularly in the scriptures, is a morality tale. The tale they are reenacting is one of the clearest examples of just war presented in the scriptures. Unlike most big ideas, it also has a clear and compelling story to go along with it.  I wouldn't mind seeing these types of things between conference sessions. As a reenactment of a story that sets a clear example of just war, it only glorifies violence to the extent that the viewer dislikes the "military stud muffin" (as Jana Reiss put it) that is Captain Moroni. In some circles Moroni is just the Mormon GI Joe that sets a horrible example of militant behavior. I think its a bit more nuanced than that.  I spend a good deal of time in my second book (Reassessing the Book of Mormon) looking at some of the events before the great war that might have justified his actions, but also some of the things that happened after the war that suggest the negative consequences of them. I also look at how his actions likely played into Amalickiah's hands and strengthened his ability to wage war against the Nephites. For example, Moroni expelled settlers from the East Wilderness in chapter 50. If Amalickiah was warning about the Nephite menace, and the need for Lamanites to preemptively attack them, this attack by Moroni couldn't have been a better example of that danger. This action did strengthen the Nephite realm, but it was incredibly provocative and also strengthened Amalickiah's rationale for attacking the Nephites.   This kind of analysis is sorely lacking in our discussion of warfare. I've been astounded in fact at the number of otherwise intelligent people that simply haven't studied these matters in depth or refuse to consider alternative positions.  

Anyways, thanks for sharing the video and letting me comment. 

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

Up until I was maybe five, I loved cowboys. I had a horse on springs, my dad made me a little leather hat, I even had little chaps and a vest. 

I also had a very realistically-designed toy Colt pistol made of real metal that looked like it came from the late 1800s. 

Gradually, I realized what me and my brother and friends were actually acting out. The way we played, I wasn't consciously aware of what we were pantomiming; I thought of it as just a game. When I 'shot' someone, I didn't think in terms of killing, it was a completely abstract ritual that had no connection to reality. It was like playing Tag; you say 'bang', the other guy falls down, and then he resurrects a few seconds later and the chase begins again. But when I began putting the puzzle pieces together and fully understanding what we were miming, I was horrified. We were 'having fun' by pretending to KILL EACH OTHER. I quickly became extremely uncomfortable. Later, I didn't even like playing with our SuperSoaker squirtguns, because they were molded to look like machine guns. I did not encounter Airsoft guns until the past few years, after I moved from Hawaii to the mainland; I found the whole concept not just morally repugnant but mindlessly boring even from a purely 'entertainment' perspective. 

To say that 'boys will be boys' discounts the role of culture in these things. Obviously we're not tabula rasa and there is probably a masculine primate dominance component to aggression and expansionist warfare. But if this is so, then we should be shaping our culture to channel that energy in a productive way that benefits the community in peaceful ways, not have these relatively affluent children pantomime wars that they will probably never face, but which other children do see every day. 

Look, I get it. If Trump is elected and starts WWIII with all his 'just telling it how it is' bull$hit and the economy collapses and we have to go into survivalist mode and compete for resources by forming tribes and roving around kicking a$$ in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future, then we'll have to learn to shoot, and it will be very noble of us Big Strong Men to protect the Poor Defenseless Women. Great. Wonderful. Can't wait. 

Are we seriously trying to justify these wargames because they are somehow 'educational' or 'preparation' in the event that The End actually happens? What complete nonsense. What a waste of a finite lifetime. If we were serious about it, we would be teaching these kids games that make it 'cool' to think about resource management and intercultural communication and conflict resolution. The fact that that sounds pathetically, mind-numbingly boring and will be dismissed out of hand as being impossible to interest young people in shows how sick this culture is. Fact is, adults are rarely conscious of how their attitude towards these issues affects the children they are in charge of; the children are usually mimicking the adult response of being being bored with subtleties and only interested in conflict and violence and (sanitized, blood-free) explosions and black-and-white thinking. If the adults provided a culture in which warfare was acknowledged as a horrendous necessity but never, ever celebrated as 'cool', then kids would pick up on it. 

This has nothing to do with being 'politically correct' (which, whenever someone uses it, is never even an argument, but rather just a sad attempt to characterize the opposite side as being unworthy of listening to without bothering to examine their evidence.) I am not opposed to showing violence in media. To the contrary, I think we should show more, but rather than glamorizing it and stylizing it like in a 90s James Bond flick or Matrix fantasy, where it's all about the graceful ballet of people dodging bullets that kill nameless hordes of depersonalized Bad Guys without even making them bleed, we should show it more as a Saving Private Ryan thing, where we actually see the cost. Or we can show completely over-the-top gruesomeness as satire, which knowingly exaggerates the violence and rhetoric used to justify it in order to call attention to how stupid all the grandstanding really is. (It's not gruesome, but one thinks of the satire in the Community paintball episode.)

The fact that this video is so twisted that it can use the fact that the vast majority of the scriptures detail utterly horrific and unjustified genocides and use it as a SELLING POINT to get CHILDREN interested in them is simply obscene and absurd. 

I'm a history major. The past 5,000 years were utterly drenched in bloodshed. (The tired canard that religion somehow acts as a 'check' or a 'brake' against the natural human tendency towards violence, merely because the death tolls exacted by the 'atheistic' regimes in the 20th century were higher than during, say, the crusades, simply because modern weaponry hadn't been invented yet, is laughable.) Yes, there have been Just Wars that needed to be fought because there was simply no other way to get the opposite side to leave the innocent alone. But there are far more utterly needless wars that happen for no reason except sheer human stupidity dressed up in high-sounding rhetoric. 

To implicitly claim that there is some necessary biological connection that links boys with guns is so myopically culture-bound I have to laugh or despair. (If nothing else, it completely discounts the female archers and snipers and sharpshooters found throughout history.) 

This entire video is just morally repulsive. It is not clever sophisticated satire, it is certainly not showing the desperate necessity and brutal consequences and moral ambiguities  of even the most Just War. These are children being dressed up in extremely realistic miniature SWAT gear and set against others in 'bad guy' outfits. In a world where there are literally child soldiers and school shootings, I can't believe sane adults actually rounded up a bunch of boys and got them to act this all out as if it was just a cool, harmless way to spend their time. It takes for granted an utterly appalling worldview in which the only way to get boys interested in studying history is to show how violent and 'cool' the scriptures are. It sanitizes warfare to highlight the cool explosions, but doesn't show the horrific consequences which might make one reconsider the cost of violence. There is no actual bloodshed; the children simply explode in a burst of SFX CGI fire. There are no entrails, no spurts of blood, no guts and hearts and brains and limbs left spattered across the landscape, no children left fatherless, no widows screaming, no PTSD, no parents left bereft, no collapsed infrastructure, no population depletion when most of the country's young men simply do not come home. It is trivializing violence and whitewashing the horrific consequences. 

We do a disservice to children when we assume they are incapable of complex moral reasoning. The adults who made this video should be ashamed of themselves. It's one thing for an adult to watch Blood Diamond; it's quite another to 'play' these wargames and glamorize appalling violence by an appeal to scripture and God. 

Because, as I said, there clearly just aren't enough school shootings or terrorist attacks. In real life, those who are killed are not resurrected five seconds later like in the games I played when I was a child. As far as I can tell, the millions slaughtered for absolutely no good reason are not resurrected at all. But who cares about that? Let's teach our kids how cool it is to blow each other up, and then we can pretend to be surprised when that's just what the next generation does, and the next generation after that, and on and on until our species goes extinct. 

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

I'm sorry if I'm getting heated. Not too long ago I read Dave Cullen's book on the Columbine massacre, and the intersection of violence and youth culture has been on my mind.  

[bluebell]

19 minutes ago, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

I'm sorry if I'm getting heated. Not too long ago I read Dave Cullen's book on the Columbine massacre, and the intersection of violence and youth culture has been on my mind.  

That's a good book. I also have a degree in history and I ended up writing a couple papers on that book while I was in school. 

[Ahab]

46 minutes ago, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

Up until I was maybe five, I loved cowboys. I had a horse on springs, my dad made me a little leather hat, I even had little chaps and a vest. 

I also had a very realistically-designed toy Colt pistol made of real metal that looked like it came from the late 1800s. 

Gradually, I realized what me and my brother and friends were actually acting out. The way we played, I wasn't consciously aware of what we were pantomiming; I thought of it as just a game. When I 'shot' someone, I didn't think in terms of killing, it was a completely abstract ritual that had no connection to reality. It was like playing Tag; you say 'bang', the other guy falls down, and then he resurrects a few seconds later and the chase begins again. But when I began putting the puzzle pieces together and fully understanding what we were miming, I was horrified. We were 'having fun' by pretending to KILL EACH OTHER. I quickly became extremely uncomfortable. Later, I didn't even like playing with our SuperSoaker squirtguns, because they were molded to look like machine guns. I did not encounter Airsoft guns until the past few years, after I moved from Hawaii to the mainland; I found the whole concept not just morally repugnant but mindlessly boring even from a purely 'entertainment' perspective. 

To say that 'boys will be boys' discounts the role of culture in these things. Obviously we're not tabula rasa and there is probably a masculine primate dominance component to aggression and expansionist warfare. But if this is so, then we should be shaping our culture to channel that energy in a productive way that benefits the community in peaceful ways, not have these relatively affluent children pantomime wars that they will probably never face, but which other children do see every day. 

Look, I get it. If Trump is elected and starts WWIII with all his 'just telling it how it is' bull$hit and the economy collapses and we have to go into survivalist mode and compete for resources by forming tribes and roving around kicking a$$ in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future, then we'll have to learn to shoot, and it will be very noble of us Big Strong Men to protect the Poor Defenseless Women. Great. Wonderful. Can't wait. 

Are we seriously trying to justify these wargames because they are somehow 'educational' or 'preparation' in the event that The End actually happens? What complete nonsense. What a waste of a finite lifetime. If we were serious about it, we would be teaching these kids games that make it 'cool' to think about resource management and intercultural communication and conflict resolution. The fact that that sounds pathetically, mind-numbingly boring and will be dismissed out of hand as being impossible to interest young people in shows how sick this culture is. Fact is, adults are rarely conscious of how their attitude towards these issues affects the children they are in charge of; the children are usually mimicking the adult response of being being bored with subtleties and only interested in conflict and violence and (sanitized, blood-free) explosions and black-and-white thinking. If the adults provided a culture in which warfare was acknowledged as a horrendous necessity but never, ever celebrated as 'cool', then kids would pick up on it. 

This has nothing to do with being 'politically correct' (which, whenever someone uses it, is never even an argument, but rather just a sad attempt to characterize the opposite side as being unworthy of listening to without bothering to examine their evidence.) I am not opposed to showing violence in media. To the contrary, I think we should show more, but rather than glamorizing it and stylizing it like in a 90s James Bond flick or Matrix fantasy, where it's all about the graceful ballet of people dodging bullets that kill nameless hordes of depersonalized Bad Guys without even making them bleed, we should show it more as a Saving Private Ryan thing, where we actually see the cost. Or we can show completely over-the-top gruesomeness as satire, which knowingly exaggerates the violence and rhetoric used to justify it in order to call attention to how stupid all the grandstanding really is. (It's not gruesome, but one thinks of the satire in the Community paintball episode.)

The fact that this video is so twisted that it can use the fact that the vast majority of the scriptures detail utterly horrific and unjustified genocides and use it as a SELLING POINT to get CHILDREN interested in them is simply obscene and absurd. 

I'm a history major. The past 5,000 years were utterly drenched in bloodshed. (The tired canard that religion somehow acts as a 'check' or a 'brake' against the natural human tendency towards violence, merely because the death tolls exacted by the 'atheistic' regimes in the 20th century were higher than during, say, the crusades, simply because modern weaponry hadn't been invented yet, is laughable.) Yes, there have been Just Wars that needed to be fought because there was simply no other way to get the opposite side to leave the innocent alone. But there are far more utterly needless wars that happen for no reason except sheer human stupidity dressed up in high-sounding rhetoric. 

To implicitly claim that there is some necessary biological connection that links boys with guns is so myopically culture-bound I have to laugh or despair. (If nothing else, it completely discounts the female archers and snipers and sharpshooters found throughout history.) 

This entire video is just morally repulsive. It is not clever sophisticated satire, it is certainly not showing the desperate necessity and brutal consequences and moral ambiguities  of even the most Just War. These are children being dressed up in extremely realistic miniature SWAT gear and set against others in 'bad guy' outfits. In a world where there are literally child soldiers and school shootings, I can't believe sane adults actually rounded up a bunch of boys and got them to act this all out as if it was just a cool, harmless way to spend their time. It takes for granted an utterly appalling worldview in which the only way to get boys interested in studying history is to show how violent and 'cool' the scriptures are. It sanitizes warfare to highlight the cool explosions, but doesn't show the horrific consequences which might make one reconsider the cost of violence. There is no actual bloodshed; the children simply explode in a burst of SFX CGI fire. There are no entrails, no spurts of blood, no guts and hearts and brains and limbs left spattered across the landscape, no children left fatherless, no widows screaming, no PTSD, no parents left bereft, no collapsed infrastructure, no population depletion when most of the country's young men simply do not come home. It is trivializing violence and whitewashing the horrific consequences. 

We do a disservice to children when we assume they are incapable of complex moral reasoning. The adults who made this video should be ashamed of themselves. It's one thing for an adult to watch Blood Diamond; it's quite another to 'play' these wargames and glamorize appalling violence by an appeal to scripture and God. 

Because, as I said, there clearly just aren't enough school shootings or terrorist attacks. In real life, those who are killed are not resurrected five seconds later like in the games I played when I was a child. As far as I can tell, the millions slaughtered for absolutely no good reason are not resurrected at all. But who cares about that? Let's teach our kids how cool it is to blow each other up, and then we can pretend to be surprised when that's just what the next generation does, and the next generation after that, and on and on until our species goes extinct. 

What you played at when you were younger is what most guys long for, I think.  Where playing war is fun and everybody can get back up after they have been "dead" for just a little bit.  With some people occasionally taken out of the entire game series. 

Maybe once we're all resurrected we can play that way again.   

Nobody really dies anyway,  in real life.  We just move on to another level of game playing. 

[oremites]

42 minutes ago, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

Because, as I said, there clearly just aren't enough school shootings or terrorist attacks.

My friends and I grew up on old war movies and TV shows.  We had toy soldiers we played with.  We all had easy access to real guns as we grew older.  Strangely enough, there were no school shootings or terrorist attacks by us or by anyone else.  

So what's the cause of these school shootings and terrorist attacks?  It's certainly not harmless videos like the one you're completely overreacting about. As you said, "We do a disservice to children when we assume they are incapable of complex moral reasoning."

[bluebell]

11 minutes ago, oremites said:

My friends and I grew up on old war movies and TV shows.  We had toy soldiers we played with.  We all had easy access to real guns as we grew older.  Strangely enough, there were no school shootings or terrorist attacks by us or by anyone else.  

So what's the cause of these school shootings and terrorist attacks?  It's certainly not harmless videos like the one you're completely overreacting about. As you said, "We do a disservice to children when we assume they are incapable of complex moral reasoning."

A lot of psychologists are starting to believe that it's a symptom of degenerate masculinity due to a loss of power coupled with American cultural expectations and beliefs about men. 

From the article Mass Shootings in the US

"This research provides important evidence of what men perceive as masculine in the first place (resources they rely on in a crisis) and a new kind evidence regarding the relationship of masculinity and violence.  The research does not suggest that men are somehow inherently more violent than women.  Rather, it suggests that men are likely to turn to violence when they perceive themselves to be otherwise unable to stake a claim to a masculine gender identity.

A Cultural expectation

But certainly boys and men experience all manner of gender identity threat in other societies.  Why are American boys and men more likely to react with such extreme displays?  To answer this question, we need an explanation that articulates the role that American culture plays in influencing boys and young men to turn to this kind of violence at rates higher than anywhere else in the world.  This means we need to turn our attention away from the individual characteristics of the shooters themselves and to more carefully investigate the sociocultural contexts in which violent masculinities are produced and valorized

Research shows that when an identity someone cares about is called into question, they are likely to react by over-demonstrating qualities associated with that identity.  As this relates to gender, some sociologists call this “masculinity threat.”  And while mass shootings are not common, research suggests that mass shooters experience masculinity threats from their peers and, sometimes, simply from an inability to live up to societal expectations associated with masculinity (like holding down a steady job, being able to obtain sexual access to women’s bodies, etc.) – some certainly more toxic than others

Men have historically benefited from a great deal of privilege – white, educated, middle and upper class, able-bodied, heterosexual men in particular.  Social movements of all kinds have slowly chipped away at some of these privileges.  So, while inequality is alive and well, men have also seen a gradual erosion of privileges that flowed more seamlessly to previous generations of men (white, heterosexual, class-privileged men in particular).  Michael Kimmel suggests that these changes have produced a uniquely American gendered sentiment that he calls “aggrieved entitlement.”  Of course, being pissed off about an inability to cash in on privileges previous generations of men received without question doesn’t always lead to mass shootings.  But, from this cultural perspective, mass shootings can be understood as an extremely violent example of a more general issue regarding changes in relations between men and women and historical transformations in gender, race, and class inequality."

[canard78]

10 hours ago, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

Yeah, let's glamorize child soldiers and snipers and automatic weaponry and super awesome explosions, all done in the name of God. 

Because there just aren't enough school shootings and terrorist attacks. 

*barf*

I'll bet it was the best young men's activity they've had in ages though. 

I used to "play guns" from about as soon as I could pick up a stick. If I'd had a benevolent uncle/youth leader who offered to film me playing guns and then add in FX I'd have considered him my hero. 

I am yet to plan any nefarious attacks. 

[canard78]

11 hours ago, cinepro said:

This is how it's done. 

The Battle of Jershon

My wife suggested they play this on BYU TV between conference sessions, but I think she overestimates the average conference viewer's tolerance for artistic license.

Are these boys the sons of storm troopers, 'cause they've got a terrible aim?

Edited May 11, 2016 by canard78

[The Nehor]

3 hours ago, oremites said:

My friends and I grew up on old war movies and TV shows.  We had toy soldiers we played with.  We all had easy access to real guns as we grew older.  Strangely enough, there were no school shootings or terrorist attacks by us or by anyone else.  

So what's the cause of these school shootings and terrorist attacks?  It's certainly not harmless videos like the one you're completely overreacting about. As you said, "We do a disservice to children when we assume they are incapable of complex moral reasoning."

What is disturbing is how after Columbine most school shooters have modeled themselves after it. Later versions seem to have no real malice or hatred, at least not on the same level. They are just doing 'it' the way they are supposed to.

3 hours ago, oremites said:

My friends and I grew up on old war movies and TV shows.  We had toy soldiers we played with.  We all had easy access to real guns as we grew older.  Strangely enough, there were no school shootings or terrorist attacks by us or by anyone else.  

So what's the cause of these school shootings and terrorist attacks?  It's certainly not harmless videos like the one you're completely overreacting about. As you said, "We do a disservice to children when we assume they are incapable of complex moral reasoning."

Actually there were terrorist attacks in America since time immemorial. We just largely forgot about them.

1886 - Haymarket Affair, labor protestors detonate a bomb during a rally. Police fired into the crowd and 12 people died.

1910 - Dynamite planted at Los Angeles Times building by union activists, 21 people died.

1916 - Suitcase bomb detonated in San Francisco in a parade killing 10. Believed to have been planted by anti-war activists as the parade supported US entrance into the First World War.

1917 - Children discover bomb outside of a church. Not realizing it was armed it was taken to the police and exploded, killing 10.

1920 - A cast was stopped on Wall Street in front of the J.P. Morgan building. Minutes later it exploded killing 30. Believed to be the work of Italian anarchists.

1927 - Dynamite planted throughout a school in Michigan killing 45 people including 38 children. Man later destroyed his farm and killed his wife. He then committed suicide by explosion taking the school principal with him. Deadliest school massacre in our history. Later discovered there was over 500 pounds of explosives under the school that did not go off. Could have been much worse.

1933 - Boeing 247 crashed after a mid-air explosion from a nitroglycerin time bomb. Case never solved.

1940-1956 - Mad bomber sustained a work injury and developed tuberculosis. Blaming the company he planted bombs throughout New York and detonated 22 of them injuring 15 people. He was committed.

1958 - The oldest Jewish temple in the U.S. was bombed by white supremacists due to the Rabbi's support of the Civil Rights movement.

1960 - Unknown bomber planted bombs in New York's public transit. Killed a 15 year old girl and injured dozens more.

1963 - Baptist church in Birmingham bombed by white supremacists in opposition to the Civil Rights Movement (MLK and others often met there). 23 injured and 4 young girls were killed.

1969 - Radical leftist bombed the Marine Midland bank.

1969 - Bomb exploded in Manhatten criminal court to protest the war.

1970 - Anti-war activists detonated a van filled with explosives at the University of Wisconsin to protest the campus's government-funded research. 1 death, 3 injured.

1970 - Explosion in Portland Oregon destroys their replica of the Liberty Bell.

1971 - Bomb detonated in front of the Soviet Cultural building in DC. Suspected to have been Jewish extremists fighting anti-semitism.

1971 - Radical students detonated a bomb in the US Capitol building doing $300k worth of damage to protest the U.S. supported invasion of Laos.

1974 - Alphabet bomber detonates a bomb at LAX killing 3 and wounding many.

1975 - Bomb detonates in La Guardia killing 11 and wounding 75. Still unsolved.

1980 - Bomb detonated in the Statue of Liberty Story Room. No one was there. FBI suspected Croatian separatists.

1983 - Bomb detonated in the US Senate building to protest US involvement in Lebanon and Grenada.

1985 - Head of American-Arab Anti-Discrimination building was killed opening a door to his office triggering a bomb. This and related attacks in the same year were suspected to be performed by the Jewish Defense League.

1989 - Riverdale Press in the Bronx firebombed by Molotov Cocktails after defending the novel "The Satanic Verses", a book many Muslims considered blasphemous. Khomeni declared a fatwah against the author.

1993 - First World Trade Center attack, killing six and injuring more then a thousand. Financier behind the attack was later involved in 9/11.

1995 - Oklahoma City bombing. Killed 116 and injured another 680.

1995 - Unabomber campaign.

1996 - During the Atlanta Olympics a duffel bag with three pipe bombs and other dangerous stuff detonated and killed 1 and injured 11 in protest of perceived socialist support for the Olympics.

2001 - 9/11, needs no other explanation.

2002 - Pipe bomber starts detonating bombs at locations intended to draw a smiley face throughout the Midwest on maps.

2008 - Bomb detonated at Times Square Military Recruiting Office. Unsolved.

2008 - Bomb detonated at San Diego courthouse. Unsolved.

2009 - Fight Club bomber attempts to reenact the Fight Club movie. He damaged a bench.

2013 - Boston Marathon bombing.

 

As for things like school shootings....also not new. The first we have good record of is Four native Lenape Warriors breaking into a school. The schoolmaster was shot and scalped and the children were tomahawked and scalped. Most died. It was basically a guerilla war. Some tribal leaders rebuked them for cowardice in attacking children. The Pennsylvania Assembly and Governor retaliated by putting a bounty on Indian scalps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States

You shouldn't have trouble finding some that match your childhood. Now the death count has increased considerably per incident but that is mostly due to the improved firing capability of the weapons used.

[Robert F. Smith]

On 5/10/2016 at 11:33 AM, cinepro said:

This is how it's done. 

The Battle of Jershon

My wife suggested they play this on BYU TV between conference sessions, but I think she overestimates the average conference viewer's tolerance for artistic license.

Extraordinary.  Who said you need to have a large budget?

[Robert F. Smith]

21 hours ago, The Nehor said:

........................................................................................  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States

You shouldn't have trouble finding some that match your childhood. Now the death count has increased considerably per incident but that is mostly due to the improved firing capability of the weapons used.

Not true.  The lists only show the extreme rarity of such events in general during long periods.  There have been times and places in which cultural and political upheaval have certainly taken place, causing violence and even all out war in America.  At other times, we have seen generations of unusual calm.

Back in the 1950s, for example, despite the fact that Black men were regularly lynched in the deep South, most of America was unusually quiet and well-behaved.  There was no security at any airport.  All one needed was his plane ticket.  High school ROTC students went to the principal's office, got their match .22 rifles and some ammo and took it to the range in the basement of the admin bldg for target practice -- without adult supervision.  Any kid wanting a .22 rifle or pellet gun could go to any store and buy it himself, again without adult supervision or permission.  People in general were relaxed and responsible.  Even the Beat Generation seemed intellectually and artistically upbeat.  Then came the Vietnam War, Hippies, Nixon, and all the rest . . .  Now we live in a garrison society in which our privacy is no longer respected and no one can trust his neighbor.  A fine how do you do.  It is not the weapons which have changed.  It is the people and the culture.

[rodheadlee]

I guess I was a failure as a kid. I raced dirt bikes. Started at 7 years old looking for lost gold mines in the desert, we wound up racing from site to site. never did find any gold. I ws the youngest entrant in a 500 miler at 11 years old. I only made it 120 miles. Got married at 19 and traded the race bike for a ski boat.