Pro-wrestling on TV may spur violence among teens.

[canadianpittbull]

Check this out and lets begin the discussion. Man the times have changed huh?!

Admin Edit: URL tagged for convenience

[gwffantrav]

I've always likened Pro wrestling to either football or hockey.

Now granted, Trish is about the sexiest thing out there, but my problem with wrestling today is all of the blatant sexuality.

But that's just my opinion

[offspring515]

This is a lot like when some teenage kids shoot up their school and people want to blame it on violent video games. It's idiotic and another sign of the downward spiral we're taking into becoming a "victim" society.

If someone watches wrestling then beats up his wife, is it wrestlings fault? Please, if he wasn't watching wrestling he'd see violence in a movie or hear about it in a song, or watch it on the evening news. Violence is a reality in our world, but that doesn't mean it should be a scapegoat for every time someone decides to pop someone upside the head.

As to the sexuality, I can understand why some people don't like it. I myself enjoy it, to a point. Still, I wouldn't mind it being toned down in order to present more wrestling...but I could say the same for goofy skits and DX and Vinny Mac and blah blah blah.

[steelthunder814]

I've heard all the same stuff for yrs....IMO...it's the product of your enviroment and personal responsiblity that determines your actions!

[offspring515]

Exactly!

I have a very hard time believing that a well adjusted "normal" person would watch a WWE show and then go out and beat someone up.

I have no problem at all in believing that someone with a predisposition to violence (as caused by a mental issue or their lifestyle/upbringing) might watch a WWE show and beat someone up.

The problem isn't the show though, it's the person.

Edited to Add......

Steel I see your title under your name says "no springs". Being Off"spring" this angers me, and I'm going to beat you up for it.

Why? Because I watched the diva search tonight and JT didn't win.

[Darth Turkish]

People need something to blame. It is much easier/ convenient to blame some thing as opposed to some one. Notice how you never hear about the parenting skills? Nor the fact that some people are predisposed to violence, like some people are predisposed to chocolate?

I remember the heavy metal and Dungeons and Dragons witch hunts of the 80's: Everytthing from satanic practices to teenage suicide was blamed on that. Despite the fact that only a small grouping of kids were the focus, and ignoring the fact that millons of metal and DnD fans never stepped outside the norm, these forms of entertainment were challenged for their morality. I still say, where were these kids' parents?

But that question will never be asked in public.

[swarm]

turkish said:

People need something ti blame. It is much easier/ convenient to blame some thing as opposed to some one. Notice how you never hear about the parenting skills? Nor the fact that some people are predisposed to violence, like some people are predisposed to chocolate?

damn you beat me to it. well said.

[Pete]

The important thing to take away from any study of this sort: Correlation does not equal causation.

Here is a proven, inarguable fact: there is a known correlation between the rise of ice cream sales in a given area and the rise of the crime rate in that area.

Clearly L. Brent Bozell or the leaders of Focus on the Family or whatever other "family-values"-obsessed organization should be looking into eliminating the sale of ice cream, right?

[blueraider1]

swarm said:

turkish said:

People need something ti blame. It is much easier/ convenient to blame some thing as opposed to some one. Notice how you never hear about the parenting skills? Nor the fact that some people are predisposed to violence, like some people are predisposed to chocolate?

damn you beat me to it. well said.

amen brother.

[Big Bri]

turkish said:

Notice how you never hear about the parenting skills?

Bingo.

[gatekeeper]

I hate these kind of articles. How many millions of people watch wrestling every year? We don't see violent crimes increasing on an exponential scale do we?

Men are more prone to physical violence than women. Wow, big shock there. Men have more testosterone than women, i.e. they will be more aggressive and violent in nature. It's biology.

It has more to do with their upbringing than anything else IMO.

[Darth Turkish]

pete said:

Here is a proven, inarguable fact: there is a known correlation between the rise of ice cream sales in a given area and the rise of the crime rate in that area.

It is so true that people can find causation with anything. But the general public, which is spoonfed information, has little background in whatever are it is (in this case, wrestling) and blindly accepts what they are bing told without question.

This stuff is all random, as with the ice cream and crime example. Any two things can be put together and made to be correlated. Again, the root fo the problem is ignored. Perhaps some in of the cases, the parenting is top notch, and that given situation may be an abberation. But in many situations, it is shoddy parenting that is the true culprit.

I am going to stop before I write a dissertation.

[Pete]

Actually, the ice cream/crime thing isn't random: ice cream sales shoot up the warmer it gets outside. So does crime--more people on the streets, and when would you rather break into a house: when it's 75 outside or when it's 20 degrees and snowing? Perfect example of a logical correlation, but with a third factor being the cause.

About the public being spoonfed information...moreso than their lack of knowledge of wrestling (or whatever the subject may be), the general public has an appalling lack of understanding of statistics and critical thinking in general. This is one of the perks of living in an anti-intellectualist country that has more interest in where Paris Hilton's dog last took a crap or in trying to shoehorn creation science into public classrooms, than the work of mathematicians, scientists, and other people dismissed as "eggheads."

</soapbox> Sorry, something about the General Discussion forum gets me going on rants.

[offspring515]

I think in general it's just the fact that people will HEAR a sound bite and blindly accept it as fact. After all "It was on the news!". Having worked in journalism I get a good laugh out of that one.

[gwffantrav]

offspring515 said:

I think in general it's just the fact that people will HEAR a sound bite and blindly accept it as fact. After all "It was on the news!". Having worked in journalism I get a good laugh out of that one.

Kinda like when everyone in the news says Bush lied jk

[Darth Turkish]

offspring515 said:

I think in general it's just the fact that people will HEAR a sound bite and blindly accept it as fact. After all "It was on the news!". Having worked in journalism I get a good laugh out of that one.

That was what I was going for.

[offspring515]

Yeah, I thought your post was very well put Turkish.

I really don't think it's a "stupid" thing, because I know some very smart people who will recite a statistic they heard on a news show as fact. It's natural to accept people in a position of authority as being "smarter" than us.

[pikemojo]

This is kinda funny because I just got into an argument after having my mom tape Ultimate Fight Night last week. She says "How can you watch this?" I said "Because it is cool and it is a sport just like boxing." I went into my rant about how UFC is safer than boxing and noone has died in UFC but has in boxing and then she goes off about how it is really popular now for people to imitate this and have fight clubs on college campuses. (I had heard the same thing 2 weeks earlier when she saaw that I owned Fight Club.) I simply asked if she thought that alcohol might have been involved in any of this and she pretty much shut up. Like people didn't get drunk and fight prior to UFC's recent popularity.

[Shon Maxx]

Thanks for the topic. I needed a laugh...not at the discussion, but at how stupid people are to blame something.

I used to play Dungeons and Dragons, and my mom thought I was either Satantic or suicidal. Neither happened.

When I played Pokemon, I once had an argument with 2 different people within a 30 minute span. One told me his pastor told him it was evil, and he was going to pray for me. The other said that Pokemon was evil because people were shooting themselves over the cards (First of all, I was playing the video game...second...people shoot others over sneakers; does that mean we should all walk around barefoot?).

I love how the article mentioned that kids who watched wrestling were more likely to carry handguns. To quote Bill Engval, "Evel Knievel couldn't make that leap!"

I've watched wrestling for nearly 20 years. I've seen a gun used Once! How does that increase people carrying them? I might be wrong here, but chairs seem to be used more than any other weapon in wrestling. So how many crimes have we heard of where chairs were used? Not many that I recall, if any.

It reminds me of the project I did in one of my Psychology classes in which I responded to experiment that proved that video games cause violent tendencies in children. Of course, most people would look immediately to the end of the article instead of actually reading that the people left out several factors that they believed had no impact on the experiment (childrens' backgrounds, reactions that Weren't deamed violent,etc.) and based most of their findings on a rise in a specific chemical in the children's blood...the same chemical that rises during Every physical activity we humans participate in.

So how many marathon runners have murdered people lately?

The problem, as so many on this board have mentioned, is that parents believe television should raise their children, not them. Therefore, it's to blame for everything. These are the same people who would read the above article and yank their children's games away and slap the kids around for even owning them.

Like the old guy at the end of my GMR magazine once said, "They don't need to check the kids' ID's, they need to check the parents' IQ's!"

Okay I'm done ranting now. It just gets me emotional and angry. I must be watching too much wrestling. Those 5 minutes of TNA last night really turned me into a murderer!



Take care,

Jay