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Subject: 
Re: Arkham Asylum - A cool set, but a bit disturbing.
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.off-topic.debate
Date: 
Thu, 7 Jun 2007 21:35:27 GMT
Viewed: 
7700 times
  
In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Dave Schuler wrote:
   In lugnet.off-topic.debate, John Neal wrote:

   All you do is give, Dave!

My generosity and my humility are the two attributes of which I’m most proud.

Not to mention your eloquent gift of good grammar and tongue-in-cheekiness.

  
  
   which side is being portrayed as good and which side as evil? The strapped-down supervillain or his torturers?

Well, I’m not too familiar with the story line here, so I can’t really say. If a bad guy is torturing a bad guy, well, while I can’t condone that type of behavior, I can’t really sympathize with the victim, either.

But you can hate the crime without loving the victim, can’t you?

Well, yeah, that’s basically what I meant.

  
   For the good/evil struggle thing to work, it is the innocent who must suffer.

Ah! But that’s the difference between melodrama and drama. The more sophistimacated challenge is for the reader/viewer to be made to sympathize with a villain rather than always rooting for the innocent victim.

And that, my friend, may be one of those “nutshell” differences between a liberal and a conservative. Assuming you are serious with your assertion (sophistimacated?), I challenge your notion that the concept of sympathizing with the villian is a more sophisticated rendition of drama. I will never understand the left’s fascination with evil, as if it can be analyzed and understood. Dwelling in evil doesn’t provide insight or understanding, but it does taint and corrupt those who choose to get too close to it. You lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.

In the final attempts to analyze evil, where does it get one? At best, genuine sympathy for the evildoer, and what good can come from that? Tolerance? Great. Let’s learn to tolerate evildoers. My suspicion is that the purpose of such endeavors is to discover how stinky someone else’s laundry is, so as to feel good about the fetor of their own. Good old relative moralism!

  
   When the evil suffer, it is plain ol’ comeuppance:-)

That’s a little too Deuteronomy for my tastes!

A new sound byte I just made up: Run away from the gray!

   IMO once the guy is strapped down (or otherwise rendered harmless) then his jailer has no business or right to inflict further harm upon him. We’ve had this discussion before, of course, and I’m sure we’ll have it again and again. But in brief, it’s not a question of “innocence” in any absolute sense; the torturer is the villian and the recipient of the torture is the victim who deserves our protection.

What would you say is the reason the victim deserves our protection?
  
All of this is beyond the scope of Richie’s initial question, I think, but it makes for interesting discussion regardless.

Yes and yup.

JOHN



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Arkham Asylum - A cool set, but a bit disturbing.
 
(...) First off, "sophistimacated" was just a means of letting out some air so that I don't start taking myself too seriously. Let me disclaim that it in this passage I'm speaking specifically of fiction rather than reality. The reason it's more (...) (17 years ago, 8-Jun-07, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Arkham Asylum - A cool set, but a bit disturbing.
 
(...) My generosity and my humility are the two attributes of which I'm most proud. (...) But you can hate the crime without loving the victim, can't you? (...) Ah! But that's the difference between melodrama and drama. The more sophistimacated (...) (17 years ago, 7-Jun-07, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)

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