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Barry Kent MacKay's avatar

Logical people will never win arguments with ideologues because ideologues are forever sharpening familiar tools: taking quotations out of context, constructing ad hominem attacks, deploying non sequiturs, misrepresentations, and outright falsehoods.

Of course UFC fighting is not lynching. The differences are numerous and obvious. Richardson never said otherwise, and reasonably assumed her readers would be intelligent enough to understand that.

What the two phenomena do share is their appeal to a part of human nature that is attracted to violence as spectacle.

UFC is a legal activity that requires remarkable training, athleticism, discipline, and skill. It is not something I personally enjoy watching, but clearly many people do, as evidenced by the large audiences it attracts. The same basic attraction to violent spectacle has existed throughout history. Respectable Roman citizens flocked to the Coliseum to watch events that were perfectly legal in their time. Crowds gathered to witness public hangings. Today, many people enjoy violent films and television dramas.

I am not immune myself. I enjoyed films such as A Clockwork Orange, Pulp Fiction, and No Country for Old Men. They are fictional, of course, but they still trade, at least in part, on our fascination with violence. At the same time, I know many people who would happily pass on such films altogether.

People differ in their tastes.

Likewise, someone attended lynchings. It is safe to assume that those who chose to witness such horrors were not individuals repelled by violence. They were people willing, even eager, to watch it. That was Richardson's point. Not that UFC spectators are equivalent to lynch mobs, but that public spectacles of violence have long appealed to certain aspects of human nature.

One can disagree with that observation, but misrepresenting it is not a rebuttal. But don’t expect everyone to understand that, or want to.

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