Clockwork Orange fans set homeless woman on fire

by **starroute** » Sun Dec 25, 2005 4:29 pm

<a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-1958417,00.html">www.timesonline.co.uk/art...17,00.html</a> <blockquote>Quote:<hr>THREE Spanish teenagers fascinated by the film Clockwork Orange burnt a homeless woman to death for kicks. María Rosario Endrinal Petite, 50, who had been sleeping in a Barcelona doorway, was attacked and set on fire with solvent. She died in hospital. It is believed to be the culmination of months of attacks on homeless people by the gang, who had become obsessed with the Stanley Kubrick film and with violent video games. . . . The day after the murder police overheard a conversation in an internet café about three regular customers who had boasted of killing a homeless person. The arrests were made. The youngest of those held claimed that they had attempted to set fire to the building, not to kill the woman. But it has been reported that the youths filmed attacks on their mobile phones and exchanged pictures with others at the internet café. One person who knew the alleged attackers told El Mundo that the three were “proud” of these attacks. “It was how they amused themselves, attacking the homeless at night,” the unnamed friend said. They were also fixated with a violent video game called Counterstrike, giving themselves code names. The three were also fans of the Spanish pop group Estirpe (Lineage), whose songs about extreme nationalism, violence and hatred for immigrants are popular among neo-Nazi gangs. . . . # Clockwork Orange was released in British cinemas in 1971 with an X rating. It got four Oscar nominations # It was adapted from Anthony Burgess’s novel written in the invented street slang Nadsat # The film’s violent scenes sparked copycat attacks. In one, a 17-year-old Dutch girl was raped in Lancashire by a gang chanting Singin’ in the Rain. In another a child was beaten by a 16-year-old boy wearing white overalls, black bowler hat and boots # Stanley Kubrick, the film’s director, voluntarily withdrew the film from British cinemas in 1973 # After the director’s death in 1999, the film was re-released in Britain # Channel 4’s screening of it in 2002 was its first on British mainstream TV # In 2003 Peter Foster, of Bridlington, Yorkshire, received two life sentences for murders 13 years apart. The murders were said to replicate the film’s attacks<hr></blockquote>

by **Hugh Manatee Wins** » Sun Dec 25, 2005 5:29 pm

The Pentagon and its CIA social-engineering division have been studying how to unlock the violence within us for decades. Showing people how to do it in movies and games eventually leads to some imitation which in turn serves to terrorize the peaceful and make them acquiescent to a police-state for 'protection.' And then the GOP promptly blames the coarsening of culture (really by their corporate accomplices) full of sex and violence on 'liberals' who support Constitutional free speech. It is a lose-lose cycle that can only be fought by exposing it so fewer are affected by this psychological warfare..

by **PeterofLoneTree** » Sun Dec 25, 2005 5:39 pm

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - "A federal judge has blocked a California law that would have made it illegal to sell or rent violent video games to minors, saying he doubted whether such sales could be banned even if the games were proved to cause violent behavior among children." Entire article at <a href="http://tinyurl.com/8l4l7">tinyurl.com/8l4l7</a>

by **Hugh Manatee Wins** » Sun Dec 25, 2005 6:06 pm

Corporations and their Pentagon have been carefully perfecting how to target the most likely candidates for complicity as consumers and soldiers. Video games are what the military uses for both training excercises and recruiting new fodder. This is called 'rehearsing' with realism. (Gary Webb also did this story just befor he died.) <a href="http://www.newsreview.com/issues/chico/2004-10-21/cover.asp">www.newsreview.com/issues.../cover.asp</a> The Killing Game By Gary Webb October 21, 2004 For young men, first-person shooters are the hottest computer games around. That's why the Army spent $10 million developing its own. But there's a catch. Big Brother gets to watch you play... ---------------------------- <a href="http://207.44.245.159/article6956.htm">207.44.245.159/article6956.htm</a> <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/09/23/BAGLG8T3MR1.DTL">www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/ar...8T3MR1.DTL</a> Army's war game recruits kids Joan Ryan 09/23/04 "San Francisco Chronicle" -- Your kids can download the "America's Army'' (Link) video game for free. Well, it is free for them. You have already paid for it with your tax dollars. In the game, kids get to kill people with cool weapons that look and respond like the real things. They get to ambush terrorists and, when caught in a firefight, they can hear bullets whistle past their ears and even hear the shell casings from their M-16s clatter onto the concrete floor. The only thing better would be an actual war with actual weapons! Which is pretty much how the Army hopes your kids will respond. "America's Army'' is one of the U.S. Army's most popular and effective recruiting tools -- conceived, designed and distributed free to reach the 13- to 21-year-old crowd. It is a brilliant marketing tactic. Unlike 30-second TV ads, the game is what the ad industry calls "sticky'' advertising: Consumers are engaged for much longer periods than with traditional commercials and ads. The game and its upgrades have been downloaded more than 16 million times since the original version was released to strong acclaim in the gaming world two years ago. It comes bundled in gaming magazines. It is given away at NASCAR events and state fairs. Since the game's release, players have completed 600 million missions during 60 million playing hours. There are more than 4 million current registered players, making it the No. 1 on-line action game. So what's the problem? After all, the Army needs lots of recruits. The target for this year is to sign up 77,000 young men and women for active duty. Next year, according to an Army spokesman, the target is 80,000. Video games are the new frontier for marketing and advertising. McDonald's, Pepsi, Nike and ESPN are among the many companies using games to attract customers and foster brand loyalty at young ages. More recently, games have become the way to sell ideas, too, particularly to kids who are still trying to figure out who they are and what they believe. The Islamic group Hezbollah produced a game called "Special Force,'' which hit stores in the Middle East last year. In it, Palestinian good guys try to vanquish Israeli soldiers and settlers. There's another lovely game called "Ethnic Cleansing,'' put out by a white supremacist group. "Games are now a more important entry point into the consumer world than any other medium,'' said Curt Feldman, senior editor at Gamespot, a Bay Area- based web site for gamers. "It has risen to the surface as the perfect way to reach very key demographic groups.'' The Army was smart enough to recognize this marketing trend and use it effectively. But there are several troubling issues: Should the government be in the business of producing violent video games when research indicates a correlation to heightened aggression? Is it appropriate to depict war as a game at a time when real men, women and children are being killed in Iraq? And what are the ethics of using video games to feed propaganda to 13- and 14-year-olds, especially propaganda with such complex moral and life-and- death implications? Let's face it. The Army isn't trying to sell kids hamburgers. It's trying to sell kids on the notion that joining the Army would be a really cool thing to do when they grow up. Yes, they might get killed. They might get maimed. But just think of the awesome grenade launchers they'll learn to use! "America's Army'' taps into so many of the longings of a boy who is coming of age, says Diane Levin, author of "Remote Control Childhood'' and a professor at Wheelock College in Boston. "(If they join the Army) they'll be part of a group outside their parents, '' Levin said from Boston. "They'll feel powerful and important. They'll be masculine and attractive. The game is working to create an image that bypasses the mind and gets to the soul.'' What the game does not capture of Army life is what it feels like to kill someone. Or what it feels like to see a buddy's leg shredded into a thousand pieces. It doesn't give kids a sense of the mind-numbing boredom and stomach- churning fear. In the real Army, you cannot press the escape button on your keyboard and come back to life. Col. Casey Wardynski, who supervised the game's production, points out that only 41 percent of the game is simulated combat. The rest relates to adventure training such as parachuting, as well as medic training, weapons training and team-building. The game, he said, depicts the Army's values of respect, discipline and camaraderie. And he says the difference between the Army's marketing to kids and, say, McDonald's, is that a kid can impulsively buy a hamburger as a result of targeted advertising, but because he's not old enough to enlist, he can't impulsively join the Army. But marketing to kids is important. Wardynski says, because, "If you don't get in there and engage them early in life about what they're going to do with their lives, when it comes time for them to choose, you're in a fallback position.'' Psychologist Susan Linn, author of the new book, "Consuming Children: Hostile Takeover of Childhood,'' disagrees. "There should be different standards about marketing to kids,'' she said from her office in Boston. "The frontal cortex of the brain, where judgment sits, doesn't fully mature until the late teens or early 20s. (Kids) tend to be more swayed by emotion because of that.'' Linn played "America's Army'' during research for her book and said that it depicted war in the way teenage boys would want it to be: exciting and even attractive. "The fact that the Army needs to recruit doesn't mean it has the right to exploit children's vulnerabilities, and do it dishonestly by glamorizing violence and minimizing or ignoring the other, more complicated facets of war,'' she said. Wardynski has heard all the criticisms before. "Kids aren't stupid,'' he said. "They know the Army is not a game. What the game does is allow them to try it on for size and get more information about the many job opportunities.'' The Army, he said, put him through college all the way to his Ph.D. He loves the Army. It's a career choice he wants to share with all kids. His enthusiasm is not dampened by the fact that 30 percent of today's recruits will fight in Iraq. America needs a standing army. So the army needs to recruit. But not at all costs. The army will have time enough to grab our boys for war when they turn 18. In the meantime, maybe it can let our kids be kids for just a while longer. --------------------------

by **mother** » Tue Dec 27, 2005 2:56 am

You are so correct, Hugh Manatee. We can count on a certain number of kids imitating exactly what they just watched or played, no matter how violent or inappropriate. A Clockwork Orange just made me sick with a violent headache and nausea and I wish that I had never seen it. I am not at all surprised that it is a classic for people of certain tastes, and I would not be surprised to learn that MRI's revealed that it causes trauma to the brain. I have always believed the constant car-chases in films have contributed heavily to bad driving and road rage.

by **Hugh Manatee Wins** » Tue Dec 27, 2005 5:33 pm

Neural paths are turned into paved roads through repetition. Lather, rinse, repeat. (At the very least, desensitization to prevent outrage is achieved.) Imitation of norms is why leadership is so important in a movement. This NYT science article about a group of baboons who lost their big bad bullying type-A males to food poisoning is an interesting example. Once the bullies were gone, those who were left behaved nicely to each other thereby highlighting the significance of making better leaders visible to a culture in order to humanize it. This is why JFK/RFK/MLK were eliminated, humanity and courage are contagious. 'No Time For Bullies: Baboons Retool Their Culture' <a href="http://forests.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=30800">forests.org/articles/read...nkid=30800</a> (mirrored since NYT requires registration) <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/nerd.gif ALT="8o"> excerpt... n a study appearing today in the journal PloS Biology (online at www.plosbiology.org), researchers describe the drastic temperamental and tonal shift that occurred in a troop of 62 baboons when its most belligerent members vanished from the scene. The victims were all dominant adult males that had been strong and snarly enough to fight with a neighboring baboon troop over the spoils at a tourist lodge garbage dump, and were exposed there to meat tainted with bovine tuberculosis, which soon killed them. Left behind in the troop, designated the Forest Troop, were the 50 percent of males that had been too subordinate to try dump brawling, as well as all the females and their young. With that change in demographics came a cultural swing toward pacifism, a relaxing of the usually parlous baboon hierarchy, and a willingness to use affection and mutual grooming rather than threats, swipes and bites to foster a patriotic spirit. Remarkably, the Forest Troop has maintained its genial style over two decades, even though the male survivors of the epidemic have since died or disappeared and been replaced by males from the outside. (As is the case for most primates, baboon females spend their lives in their natal home, while the males leave at puberty to seek their fortunes elsewhere.) The persistence of communal comity suggests that the resident baboons must somehow be instructing the immigrants in the unusual customs of the tribe. "We don't yet understand the mechanism of transmittal," said Dr. Robert M. Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford, "but the jerky new guys are obviously learning, `We don't do things like that around here.' " Dr. Sapolsky wrote the report with his colleague and wife, Dr. Lisa J. Share. Dr. Sapolsky, who is renowned for his study of the physiology of stress, said that the Forest Troop baboons probably felt as good as they acted. Hormone samples from the monkeys showed far less evidence of stress in even the lowest-ranking individuals, when contrasted with baboons living in more rancorous societies. The researchers were able to compare the behavior and physiology of the contemporary Forest Troop primates to two control groups: a similar-size baboon congregation living nearby, called the Talek Troop, and the Forest Troop itself from 1979 through 1982, the era that might be called Before Alpha Die-off, or B.A.D. ... But in the baboon study, the culture being conveyed is less a specific behavior or skill than a global code of conduct. "You can more accurately describe it as the social ethos of group," said Dr. Andrew Whiten, a professor of evolutionary and developmental psychology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who has studied chimpanzee culture. "It's an attitude that's being transmitted." The report also offers real-world proof of a principle first demonstrated in captive populations of monkeys: that with the right upbringing, diplomacy is infectious. Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal, the director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University in Atlanta, has shown that if the normally pugilistic rhesus monkeys are reared with the more conciliatory stumptailed monkeys, the rhesus monkeys learn the value of tolerance, peacemaking and mutual hip-hugging. Dr. de Waal, who wrote an essay to accompany the new baboon study, said in a telephone interview, "The good news for humans is that it looks like peaceful conditions, once established, can be maintained," he said. "And if baboons can do it," he said, "why not us? The bad news is that you might have to first knock out all the most aggressive males to get there." Jerkiness or worse certainly seems to be a job description for ordinary male baboons. The average young male, after wheedling his way into a new troop at around age 7, spends his prime years seeking to fang his way up the hierarchy; and once he's gained some status, he devotes many a leisure hour to whimsical displays of power at scant personal cost. He harasses and attacks females, which weigh half his hundred pounds and lack his thumb-thick canines, or he terrorizes the low-ranking males he knows cannot retaliate. <a href="http://z.about.com/d/politicalhumor/1/0/l/7/bush_chimp.jpg">z.about.com/d/politicalhu..._chimp.jpg</a> Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=hughmanateewins>Hugh Manatee Wins</A> at: 12/27/05 3:38 pm

by **mother** » Wed Dec 28, 2005 1:56 am

A few years ago I attendedone of those week-long training conferences and found some of the information very uplifting. In particular a series of talk given by a psychiatrist working with trauma and its effect on the brain. As Hugh mentions, experiences build certain observable paths in the brain. This is shown by magnetic resonans(sp) imagry (MRI). So a traumatised child will repeatedly use the quick path to the limbic center of the brain, the lizard part that has no empathy,etc. He may react with rage or cruelty to any body when no harm was intended at all, for example. Everybody is probably familiar with the difficult behavior that traumatised kids can present. Anyway, they discovered that repeating over and over loving words combined with massaging a leg actually builds new paths in the brain, a eventually can heal a very violent, anti-social child. This is pretty much right out of my old Irish grandmother's common sense philosophy, yet I found this so incredibly hopeful in terms of working with kids who have serious problems. This training also had me thinking about the effects of repeating prayers, why they work. That baboon bullying study was just great.

by **Telexx** » Wed Dec 28, 2005 2:32 pm

It makes me laugh when people bang on about how playing violent computer games, especially 1st person shooters like Quake or Doom, cause people to become violent. You have to be pretty unhinged in the first place to copy the action in a game like Doom or Quake. The act of playing these games doesn't actually make you unhinged in the first place. I have played first person shoot-em up games for a decade. I have never shot anyone or wanted to. For some reason this issue causes people to stop using thier common sense; and to anyone who disagrees shut up or I'll blow your ******* head off with my sawn-off shot gun <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/wink.gif ALT=";)"> -Telexx

Clockwork Orange fans set homeless woman on fire

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