They have Hostel 1 and 2 (2 apparently includes scenes in which a naked women hanging upside down from a chain has her throat slit, and another where kids play soccer with the head of someone they apparently had called friend at some point) in the checkout line at my local grocery store. They are likely not even bothering to try to prevent young kids from buying them. I was in a Big Lots, and they had Wolf Creek, again next to some romantic comedy and a cartoon DVD.
In our society, children are watching these movies when they are 12-13-14. They are watching the free and unregulated porn on the internet, possibly from even earlier ages. All of these things have an effect, on empathy, on emotional intelligence, on their “sense of life”.
Could you imagine someone producing and selling a movie in grocery stores in the 1970’s that consisted almost entirely in graphic depictions of torture and murder, with NO redeeming values at all? Which to the extent it took a side, took the side of the torturers, the Elite Hunting Club, I think it is called? It would have been a national outrage. A Congressional committee would have been formed. All the politicians would have felt the need to denounce it.
My take, virtually from the first, was that Amanda Knox was effectively feted and defended by the left not because she was innocent, but out of morbid curiosity, out of sympathy, out of recognition of the fact that she DID IT.
It is hard to feel much optimism for the future, but as I say often, I don’t run on hope. I have plans, and will executive them as well as I can, within the limits of my emotional and physical stamina.