Room 611: Wednesday, February 26. 2025

Today's schedule is BADC

B Block Criminology - We'll finish up the "Roots of Violence" discussion. Yesterday we looked at personal traits and ineffective families, so today we'll look at evolutionary factors, exposure to violence, cultural values, substance abuse, and firearm availability to see if they are factors that lead to violent crime in Canada.

Next, I would like you brainstorm a list of all the entertainment you can think of that is based in violence. Think of video games (Bulletstorm, COD, GTA), television programs (GOT, Walking Dead, AHS), books (30 Days of Night comics, Killing Floor - Jack Reacher), podcasts (My Favourite Murder, Morbid), movies (Freakshow, NBK), music (Megadeth ""Killing Is My Business... and Business Is Good!", Eminem "Kim"), sports (MMA, WWE), and other forms of entertainment. You'll get into two large groups and on chart paper I'll have you list out your top 10 most violent forms of entertainment (be specific). We'll share our lists and ask, "Why is violence entertaining"?

From Media Smarts:

In today’s mass media world, it’s commonly believed that violence sells. Violent media costs less to export and translate, and it’s more easily picked up by markets in different cultures than ours. As a language, violence is easy to understand and requires little context in order to present a plot: explosions, gunfire and martial arts are a language that anyone can understand. Consider some of the following numbers:

From 1995 to 2024, the top grossing movie for each year was a decidedly violent movie with the exception of six films, with the top two genres, adventure and action, both having elements of violence.
Films that are rated PG-13 hold about two-thirds of the American market. Films that are either PG or PG-13 make more money than all other film ratings combined and currently contain more violence than R rated films.
71 percent or 51.5 million kids under 18 are video game players in the United States.
The average age range of a video game player is 18-34 years old, with the average video game player being 33 years old.
76 percent of all video game players are over 18 years of age.
Only 12 percent of all games sold are given an M rating for “mature,” the highest rating possible.
In 2023, consumers in the United States spent approximately $57.2 billion on video games.

As these numbers show, the two major forms of entertainment media that traffic in representations of violence are huge businesses. It is important to note that no clear relationship has ever been established between media violence (including video games) and real-world violence. A recent review of academic studies found that “none of the studies critical of [violent video games] claim that they directly cause real world violence, though commentators sometimes make or imply such claims.

From NOVA What Next: Violence in the Media An in-depth analysis on the culture of violence in the media.

A Block Physical Geography - Today you'll need to define anticline & syncline (use page 228 in the Geosystems Core text Chapter 8.7 Deformation, Folding, & Faulting) and answer the question "What is a migrating terrane, how does it add to the formation of continental masses and how is it related to British Columbia?"(use page 238 in the Geosystems Core text 8.10 Mountain Building)

So, BC is geologically weird, right? We are a series of parallel mountain chains that were formed somewhere else and added to the continent by plate tectonics. An orogeny is a mountain-building episode, occurring over millions of years as a large-scale deformation and uplift of the crust. The resulting volcanic or folded and faulted mountain chains are found at the plate margins (this is BC). While Pangea split apart, North America (Laurentia) rotated northwest away from the rest of the supercontinent. The Canadian Shield, also called the Laurentian Plateau is a large area of exposed Precambrian igneous and high-grade metamorphic rocks (geological shield) that forms the ancient geological core of the North American continent (the North American Craton or Laurentia). Some of the rocks in the Canadian Shield are over 3.96 billion years old, and Laurentia has been together in its present form for the last billion years.

So, this move away from the bulk of Pangea created a subduction zone where oceanic crust slowly sank beneath the continent’s west coast (which incidentally was the Alberta/BC border). This subduction brought two chains of volcanic islands, the Stikine and Quesnellia arcs closer to North America (Laurentia). These crustal fragments are called Tectonostratigraphic Terranes...shortened to Terrane. Most of British Columbia is made up of terranes that include sedimentary rocks with fossils that imply an origin south of the equator, or volcanic rocks with magnetic orientations that indicate a southern-hemisphere origin. So, the buoyant continental crust of the Stikine and Quesnellia terranes collided with and welded to North America about 180 mya which forms what is now eastern British Columbia (The geologic name for this area is the Intermontane Superterrane).

So, what about us (Vancouver Island)? The Wrangellia Terrane (that has the Mg rich Karmutsen Formation of Basalts) formed in the ocean basin about 230 mya. The Triassic mafic and ultramafic volcanic rocks of Wrangellia are considered to be derived from a Pacific-type mantle plume source. The exact location of the hotspot is uncertain but fossil and paleomagnetic data indicate that it was located at equatorial to topical latitudes of the eastern Pacific (Panthalassa) ocean. The paleogeographic location of the Wrangellia hotspot is within the region of the current Galápagos hotspot. The Wrangellia Terrane is a part of the the Insular Superterrane which arrived on what was the west coast and got welded to the continent (think of the west coast of Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii as well as chunks of Yukon and Alaska) between 120-100 mya. At roughly the same time, the Coast Range Granite Batholith intruded into the Insular Superterrane about 100 million years ago, which formed what we now call the Coastal Mountain Range.