I like Lance Mannion’s blog, but he seems to discount anything with women in it. A lot of middle-aged men do; they can’t seem to help it. Since the protagonist of The Hunger Games isn’t even a woman, really, but is a teenage girl (though an extremely capable and whip-smart teenage girl), I was expecting that from him.

However, that’s not what I want to write about. Instead, I want to rant about this idiotic rat turd of a comment.

After a little more thought I know why I turned this off (having not read the book, which probably represents the vast majority of the movie audience) – it was right after they mention that it was the 75th annual Hunger Games, and I thought, WHAT? You mean this miserable farce has been going on that long? The population of the Districts, having once had enough spirit to rebel, is now subjecting themselves to poverty, squalor and serving up their kids every year to a slaughter? While the other half of their world lives in modern affluence? Surely you jest. I couldn’t possibly care less if you think I can even accept that premise in the first place.

Let’s see — we live in a country where income inequality has been rising for nearly forty years. Where there are 45,000 extra deaths every year due to no health insurance. Where global warming is denied, which will lead to vastly more deaths. Where living standards are falling for many, and that fall is accelerating.

And furthermore, we live in a world where a single country — Germany — singlehandedly and in an automated, industrially efficient fashion exterminated six million people not all that long ago. Where 800,000 were killed less than two decades ago in Rwanda by their former friends and neighbors. Where the Brazilian favelas exist (remind you of anything, like, say, the Districts?) A world where women are routinely “honor-killed” and have their faces burned with acid.

Compared to that, the deal that those people got, I’d rather compete in The Hunger Games. I’d have a better chance of coming out alive.

And this goddamn idiot commenter finds something like the premise of The Hunger Games implausible.

Fuck me.

I’m even choosing to ignore all the facts that she got wrong in her comment, as I don’t want to write a 3,000 word screed.

By the way, the Roman-era gladiatorial games — which I might remind you really, actually happened in our history and were more brutal than anything in Collins’ novels — went on for something like 800 years.

By the standards of what I’ve written above, to me The Hunger Games actually seems pretty tame. There, you have a one in 24 chance. In the Holocaust, in Rwanda, or as one of the 45,000 every year who dies from lack of health insurance in the US, what goddamn chance do you have?

And about that commenter, how do people live such cosseted, clueless lives? How do you fit so much dumbass in so little space?

These days, I try to avoid flinging insults like confetti at a ticker-tape parade, but sometimes it is just warranted. Not doing so would be wrong. This is one of those times.

I find it implausible how obtuse and uneducated and that commenter is, but nevertheless, there it is.