OK, now that we’ve all digested the story, should the two people who staged the video and paid the homeless men to put on the acts be prosecuted? Have they committed a crime, or simply provided work?
I say they have paid people for rendering a service, plain and simple. One of the alleged ‘victims’ agrees with me:
That is the difference. Nobody forced him to do what he did. Nobody forced him to accept the deal he made. He was, in his own words, enticed into doing it because someone offered him something he wanted. Perhaps it wasn’t money. Perhaps it was a warm place to sleep, or a clean meal, or just a bottle of Night Train. It doesn’t make any difference. He made the same kind of deal every employed person makes every day he or she shows up for work.
Was the work distasteful, demeaning, and degrading? Isn’t retail? Isn’t being a pornography actor/actress? Isn’t being a nurse, some days?
Was the work dangerous? Isn’t being a policeman? Isn’t being a soldier?
Did the work promote health problems? Doesn’t boxing? Doesn’t firefighting? Doesn’t being a nurse, when one works around possibly infected sharps?
I see this whole case founded upon something more distasteful than the ‘Bumfights’ videos: Paternalism. The idea that simply because a person is unemployed and living on the streets, he or she is incapable of making informed decisions and giving consent. Are the homeless relegated to the status of infants and the insane now? Are they infants to be cared for, or adults to be respected in their decisions? Does one’s status as an adult and free citizen depend upon housing arrangements?
I can see no possible defense for the prosecution of the filmmakers. They made a product that only harmed consenting, compensated adults. Criminalizing that calls into question the very idea of being an adult in this country.
So what if I hired you to work in my meat packing plant, which has a horrible record of employee death and disfigurement, mainly due to lack of employee training and lack of proper safety procedures? You made the choice to work there, so who cares? That’s your decision as an adult, right?
But, we have laws that force an employeer to provide a certain standard of safety. You have the right to work there, but they don’t have the right to hire you in those conditions.
This case is not about the whether or not the men should have taken the job (which would support your point), but whether the filmmakers were right to hire them.
Eonwe: If you were hired to actually test the meat packing from the POV of the meat that comparison would be a bit more spot on. These bums were hired to perform a theatrical performance of physical comedy. One of the segments “Bumhunter” is a parody of Crocodile Hunter (although it sounds like British gay porn). The bums were paid to be “captured” and held down and carried like animals. Maybe demeaning and possibly painful or injurious. So is tunt work where stunt performers take crotch hits for whatever reason.
Now for the “stunts” that are basically drunks running into things. I got the impression that they were pitched this line “We want to film some funny stuff, physical comedy. What can you do?” and the bums who were paid voulinteered to run into things. Again painful and almost certainly injurious. Sounds like any professional sport but paying much less. But if a pro baller accepted $20 dollars instead of $20 million dollars he would be a hero, not a victim. It’s up to the employee in an entertainment industry job to negotiate for more money. All that traffic will bear.
As for the actual “bumfights”, yeah thats pretty sick mainly because nobody had any teeth to begin with. And I do think there could be a legal issue about rinning a fight w/o a promoter’s liscence. But I don’t think it’s any morally worse than a boxing match or any legal fight or even an NHL game. I was assaulted by a bum once and I bet a hockey player hits a lot harder than a physical wreck like those in the video.
Is this stuff wrong and working toward the lowest common denominator? Yes. So did The Three Stooges.
Do people get hurt doing this? Probably yes, so did the original Darren from Bewitched when he worked on Wagon Trail (an injury which later prevented him from working at all. The bums seem to be able to continue with being bums).
My own question is this: Could the money used to prosecute this exploitation be better used to help bums out of being bums? This strikes me as political opportunism.
The one real crime I could spot here was them giving a crackhead money so they could film him smoking crack. This to my understanding is aiding and abetting as their money facilitated the purchase of narcotics.
p.s. Other than the crach head thing, the croc hunter parody is pretty hillarious. The bum stunts I have seen IRL outside of nightclubs for free many times, and the rotting teeth segment is disgusting.
I ordered this DVD about six months ago. I watched about half of it and sent it back for a refund. Not because I found it offensive, but because I found it incredibly lame and boring!
The majority of it isn’t bums fighting at all, but just home video footage of young guys beating each other up (actually, more like slapping each other around) in their front yards. BO-RING!
As for the ehtics of it, I know this is really politically incorrect, but the vast majority of homeless people are that way by choice. As Ned Flanders once said they’re “the people who’re just too lazy to work God bless 'em!”
And these people are totally aware and really could not care less that they’re being ‘exploited’ for some cash. And frankly, with the world on the brink of WWIII, I couldn’t care less either.
Hail, did you have anything to add to the debate? I didn’t think so. Buh-bye!
zen, I agree with you about dangerous jobs. In fact, there are plenty of jobs more dangerous than fighting that are, nonetheless, socially acceptable (and, more often than not, essential).
Maybe I’m biased because of my relatives, but the first ‘insanely dangerous’ job that comes to mind is nursing. Why? The biggest reason is sharps: One stab from the wrong needle and it’s game over. AIDS, hepatitis, drug-resistant TB, and a host of other nasties love to spread through dirty needles, and guess who handles more dirty needles in a day than you average druggie? A nurse. Some of those diseases aren’t actually fatal, but they can all ruin your body to some extent and cause you to miss massive amounts of work.
Secondly, there is the ‘angry patient factor.’ ER nurses have to contend with pretty much anyone who walks in the door, anyone from kids with earaches to the criminally insane suffering from a drug overdose. I’d rather go a round or two with a prizefighter than have to deal with a drugged-up violent psychotic.
Is getting gutpunched by a wino worse than getting TB?
Is ramming your head into a wall worse than getting AIDS?
Returning to topic: I agree that there are overtones of paternalism here. If making such tapes is illegal it should be illegal to make otherwise identical tapes using non-homeless people as the actors, and if that is not illegal then it should not be illegal to film homeless people in this fashion.
Here are some facts on the homeless (PDF file) from National Healthcare for the Homeless Council. Included is an answer to the question of whether they prefer to be homeless.
Cite, schmite! What is the point of me posting a link to some website that has statistics that agree with my point of view? I mean we all know that everything on the internet must be true!
Suffice it to say that having watched this video I don’t believe that anyone was taken advantage of. The homeless guys appeared in the video by choice. And while its kind of unseemly to pay homeless guys to do goofy shit like this, this is still America so its not illegal.
Keep in mind that when you see the homeless guys talking to the media about it, they’re getting paid for that too!
I recall the early Ultimate Fighting Championships… The rules were as follows:
No eye-gouging.
No biting.
In addition to the typical punch-kick-grapple that most fighting consists of, very large and very well trained men were taking groin shots, pulling hair, dislocating joints, attempting to break limbs, and strangling eachother. Barbaric? Incredibly. Dangerous? You bet.
But all of those involved agreed to the terms in exchange for money. These men were not exploited.
The only argument I can imagine that someone could make against the produceres of Bumfights is that these bums, being bums, were “more exploitable” than your average UFC combatant. The core of the debate, then, is whether someone’s financial/employment status alters their ability to make a personal decision to such an extent that asking them to provide a certain service is wrong.
Hail Ants, I did not disagree with you regarding whether or not making ‘Bumfights’ is illegally or immorally exploiting homeless people. Read the bottom section of my post above.
It’s your claim that homeless people are homeless by choice / too lazy to work that precipitated my call for a cite (and the pit thread as well).
This is GD and if you’re gonna make an assertion like that, you’ve got to expect to be asked to back it up. I asked. Defend or retract.
Gaijin: Maybe the argument you briefly presented in the last graf of your post isn’t strictly paternalistic, but it’s still wrongheaded. Thinking that someone is somehow less susceptible to temptation or more rational simply by virtue of economic status is not logical. Being poor isn’t a condition of immediate need, such as drowning or asphyxiation creates.
A drowning man will push down a comrade in an instinctive, irrational struggle for air. That is not an act of a rational person, even if the person is a fully competent adult in normal conditions. It is the act of a person in a condition of immediate need. It is the act of a person driven to utter irrationality by basic physical drives.
A merely dispossessed man is in no such condition. As long as he can eat enough to keep away the severest of hunger, which can turn into an immediate need in extreme circumstances, and can avoid extreme physical duress, he is as rational as the average man of better means.
And rationality is what this debate comes down to. ‘Are the homeless driven to irrationality through their poverty?’ My answer is no. I think people with more experience agree with me.
I agree. I wasn’t making that argument myself, but saying that that was the only argument I can imagine that those who oppose the bum fights video would come up with. If the wrong lay in the fighting, then all combative sports and theatrical performances that contain violence are wrong as well. Since that would be ridiculous, those opposed to Bumfighting would have to say something along the lines of “Since they were poor they were easier to exploit,” or some such garbage.
Because of Bum - Fights being in the news recently my curiousity has been aroused. I bought it on Ebay for $15.99 and have invited about 8 of my buddies over on Friday night to watch it.
We are all fraternity guys, I plan on doing Margarita’s.
Well, this will sound like a huge cop out (and maybe it is) but I don’t think statistics on the homeless have much credibility. Its just not something that you can get accurate information on because of the nature of it. These are people who live outside the ‘paper-trail’ world so the only statistics would be from anecdotal evidence, i.e. informal surveys and/or interviews, either directly with homeless people or with those who work with them.
And because of this I think that most of the data is exaggerated.
I don’t think the homeless should be rounded in to camps or anything remotely like that. I just don’t think you can lump a bunch of people together and simply refer to all of them as ‘the homeless’. I think there are certainly people & families that are only one paycheck away from it and there should certainly be public assistance available to help them.
But at the same time, having seen the Bum-Fights video, the guys in it are just that, bums. When you have a totally free society it means people are also pretty much free to be nothing more than a drunk or drug addict.
Certainly Bill Gates and Donald Trump have the opportunity to be nothing more than a drunk or a drug addict if they so choose. I’ll even grant that many of the homeless unemployed people you run into in the city we live in have had some opportunities that they did not make the best possible use of, if not necessarily the opportunity to be CEO of Microsoft or the creator and owner of some of the world’s ugliest tall buildings.
What bearing does that have on your stupid, offensive, pit-worthy claim that homeless people are homeless because they choose to be homeless?
Yes, you are copping out. You should retract, since you have no meaningful defense of your inflammatory statements.
