Zsenipoo wrote:

Maybe your law classes have desensitized you into thinking that unhip personas are morally equivalent to serial murdering. Zseni - fuddy duddy old stuck in the mud Zseni - disagrees.

I didn't bring specifically Law And Order in; I brought in shows about the exercise of law and order. That's why I used the IP-friendly lower case. And all of those shows talk about how SOMEONE is horribly fucked up one way or another. They show fucked up activities by definition. Because crime is fucked up!

I'm not arguing that trying to prevent and solve crime is grody; I'm trying to say that I just don't even understand why you would check that shit out in your free time. I consider the TV watcher's interest in crime dramas to be overweening and unhealthy, and I think the shows themselves skew people's perceptions of the world around them in unhelpful ways. One such way, my innocent friend, is in the passage of crazy-ass three strikes laws. Or to take another tack: people have saved themselves from drowning in capsizing cars because of methods presented in Mythbusters. Have rape rates dropped at all concurrent with the airing of Rape And Order episodes?

Were there sadism in Silence of the Lambs?

GET YOUR SHIT OFF OF MY MOUNTAIN POSTHASTE. You're either being mindbogglingly stupid or you don't know how to identify cruelty when you see it, though I suppose we could consider that a survival tactic in your case.

These arguments always devolve into people trying to persuade me that the sadistic shit they enjoy isn't really sadistic, because they (the people making the argument) aren't sadists! QED! One of the nicest things about Certain Posters is that they don't struggle with this issue at all: they'll make a case on the points that I'm wrong and they're sadists. I wish you would just go with that idea rather than trying to redeem The Silence Of The Fucking Lambs to Zseni - an argument that you are not now, nor will you ever be, clever enough to push.