The world is a scary and violent place. Without Liveleak, you might never feel it. Until you see the actual violence and gore, it doesn't mean anything, it's just empty words. I didn't care at all about wars in the middle east until I saw the reality on Liveleak. Seeing dead children and people with their legs blown off made all the commentary on CNN and Fox seem so understated.
A lot is said about desensitization as a result of seeing horrible things on the internet, but in my experience, only the opposite was true. Seeing violence online when I was in my late teens sensitized me and made the stories on the TV real. Frankly, I owe a lot of my political beliefs (especially on foreign policy) to horrible realities I saw on Liveleak.
War and terrorism was definitely made “more real” on LiveLeak than what you’d experience via the media or YouTube.
I also found a real appreciation for other things: driving safely, worker protections, fire safety. These “boring” things take on more importance when you can see what happens when you ignore them.
I don't think people should dwell on these morbid things. But seeing just one or two videos of, for example, a bad car crash, can really give you a healthy fear of these dangers.
I saw someone killed on a lathe on liveleak and ever since that video I've taken tool safety EXTREMELY seriously. Like, I bought safety goggles and wear them for drilling random screws. I never even thought about it before that.
Sometimes, just a story is enough. I read about a father who drove over his child while backing up. He thought his child was under his wife's supervision. Since then, all my cars have the rear view camera.
In China popular video channels available on popular apps (Wechat...) quite frequently stream accidents (nearly always catched by surveillance video surveillance), mainly traffic accident, sometimes work-related and even domestic violence.
The "didactic" tone is quite patent: don't jaywalk, drive and use machinery with care, use adequate protective gear...
Years ago a lived with someone one who loved to watch videos of people getting hit by cars. I watched a bunch of these by proxy. The thing that still sticks in my mind is that almost none of them were jaywalking. It was almost always a car running a red light. The people that got hit put too much faith in the lights.
It's amazing the narrative that is spun around cars and the deaths they cause.
Take a closer look at the "accident" reports you see in newspapers. It's disgusting how many times reports of people and children getting hit on sidewalks, sitting on benches, etc is spun as their fault for not getting out of the way of the person driving the car!!
There's been a bit of a grassroots push to get journalists to stop calling them accidents and start calling them crashes, so drivers aren't automatically pardoned in reader's minds.
"Children getting hit on sidewalks, sitting on benches" don't threaten anyone, and nobody calls any car driver upon them. The car driver is clearly the culprit, source of the danger.
At least in some cases (more often than not, as far as I know) a police officer is called by someone who noticed a dangerous/chaotic situation, and the officer isn't the cause of it.
Thank you for linking to the article showing that they improved the headline (possibly as a result of people pointing it out) to the significantly-better "A state trooper shot and killed.."
Are you suggesting that they shouldn't have changed it, because the kid was at fault?
"A trooper-involved fatal shooting in Leonardtown that ended in the death of a 16-year-old" could mean anything. It could mean that someone shot at a trooper, missed, and hit the kid. It could mean that a trooper shot at a dog in self-defense, and a kid was accidentally killed by the ricocheted bullet. It could even mean that someone shot at a trooper and the kid died of a heart attack from the noise.
"A state trooper shot and killed.." describes what happened. It's factual. It doesn't assign fault. If you think it creates too much of a gut-reaction that a trooper killing a 16-year-old is a problem, well, maybe that's a good thing because it suggests we should have more options to prevent that from happening. And if you think it's a good thing that the trooper shot him, well, the headline satisfies that as well.
> Are you suggesting that they shouldn't have changed it, because the kid was at fault?
No. "A trooper-involved fatal shooting..." is indeed blurry, and in my opinion the active voice isn't much better because for many (most?) readers it conveys that the cop action was fully intentional, however in such a context things are much more complicated than that.
It doesn't assign fault, indeed, but a more adequate title may be "In a chaotic situation a trooper shot and killed..." because when someone points a gun at you the danger grows as you take time to assess the situation, there is no way to assess from a distance if someone is or isn't able to mount an attack, the "Tueller rule"...
The act is fully intentional. When you pick up a gun, aim it at someone, put your finger on the trigger, and pull, your intent is to kill. That's like one of the first things they tell you in any gun safety course.
That intent may have been an overreaction. It may have been a mistake. It may have been based on an incorrect understanding of the situation. It may have even been justified. But regardless, the trooper did intend to kill.
Indeed, and I didn't deny it. We all call for a more objective and neutral way to concisely describe the facts. In my opinion it implies to state any pertinent element. Here: the context, which always has a major influence on intentions/choices.
My point is that a press title "In a chaotic situation a trooper shot and killed..." seems more appropriate to me. Do you agree?
> the active voice isn't much better because for many (most?) readers it conveys that the cop action was fully intentional
This looks like a denial to me. And no, I don't agree that softening a factual sentence with a single sided context is more appropriate. The entire point is to stop privileging the police's perspective as if their choices are completely circumstantial, as they have been abusing that trust.
"THEY have been abusing that trust" seems weird to me. In my opinion SOME (not "they", meaning "all") policemen have been abusing that trust, and it makes a world of difference.
Is stating that the situation was "chaotic" privileging police's perspective (which is sourced: "Col. Woodrow Jones, the state police secretary").
Dismissing every police statement because some of them were lies may be dangerous if it leads to even more "esprit de corps" (the very cause of many of such lies) among cops, or to less good guys in the police force (they usually don't want to join a despised group).
Stating that the situation "was chaotic" discounts the agency from the actors (passive voice, yet again). If that killing was justified, then meet the bar of justification - don't explain away the situation as if the trooper isn't responsible for having created it.
I see your point about othering and it's valid even for just balancing my own views. But the larger issue is that trust in the entire institution is failing.
When you have one cop murdering someone, three more standing around watching, a entire department that doesn't arrest the murder squad, a union that protects the whole lot, and a wider community that defends the whole miscarriage of justice - you don't have "one bad cop", but rather a popular culture of corruption.
Now certainly it isn't the case that every police department has had a case like that and reacted the same way. But all too many have, and if the actual good cops want to stop their institution from being indicted with a uniform brush, then they need to start speaking up about their criminal colleagues and actually enforcing the law even when the perp is wearing a uniform.
Any form (passive/active voice...) or description (especially of a wide array of attributes, for example of the context) can be interpreted in various ways, either discounting or condemning an actor.
"Chaotic", for me, conveys that there is no known way to always adequately solve this sort of problem ("911 calls ((...)) about a 'guy acting suspicious' who the callers thought had a gun"), however I reckon that interpreting it as some pseudo-justification is possible.
In a similar vein one may interpret the George Floyd case as exposing a "popular culture of corruption". One may also think that such cases have many causes, just like most major technological disasters result from a chain of causes (multiple and redundant safeties, however in some rare cases something isn't properly handled).
A main cause may be that speaking up about a criminal colleague is only possible if you know for sure that he is guilty, meaning that you probably are a witness, and in such a case a colleague of the culprit. There are many reasons for teammates to cover-up each other. For example they may all be guilty of something (establishing a "popular culture of corruption"), or they may think that their colleague is guilty but should be pardoned given his merits (somewhat acting as judges). Some configurations of the rotten apple's team forbid any upper stratum (department, union, community...) to work adequately, as they will systematically amplify the testimony of those teammates.
You don't have "one bad cop", but rather a non-neglectable probability for his teammates to avoid speaking out about his reprehensible acts, and also unreasonable hopes about the ability of upper strata to attain to the truth.
In theory we may alleviate this by establishing larger teams and/or frequently changing (rotating) their members, hoping that it will reduce complicit distortions. In practice this leads to a new set of problems, not only related to cost but also to sheer practical efficiency: a team larger and/or populated with members not used to work with each other cannot be as efficient as a small (but sufficient) and more tightly made one.
I have difficulty in believing anyone in their right mind would victim blame someone sitting on a bench for not getting out of the way of a car. This reeks of urban legend or motivated anti-motorist propoganda. The motor vehicle would have to have completely departed from the designated motorway and would as a result be completely at fault. Failure to respond to signal is also the motorist's fault, and even when out of compliance signalwise on a crosswalk, the pedestrian has right-of-way. It's right in the driver's manual for most States in the U.S.
Unless we're talking somewhere with much more fluid road laws. For the record, I've been that pedestrian getting clipped several times, and people on bicycles make me so paranoid in city driving, I've been known to lower windows to try to verbally communicate.
My issue is generally with other motorists for the most part.
>Automatically pardoned in reader's minds
There was a time I'd say you were over stating tilted journalism's influence. Nowadays I'm not so sure anymore.
It's been quite a while since I read the article blaming people for sitting on the bench. Here is a kind of similar style article I came across that tries to blame people on a sidewalk for getting hurt: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/07/04/toronto_car_cras...
Notice how half of the article is dedicated towards blaming people for entering crosswalks when they have right of way, just because a signal is changing?
Here's the kicker: the 10 (!!) people injured were on the freaking sidewalk! Why is this diatribe of blaming people for entering a crosswalk even in the article??
This isn't just urban legend or anti-motorist propaganda (really? come on). There are quite a few studies out there that look in to this and it's a real phenomenon. I don't have time right now to dig out individual studies to link, but they're fairly easy to find.
Oof. Okay. I agree that particular article could have been arranged better. For the curious.
Money shot:
>Two vehicles smashed into each other and then into a group of people and a lamp post at the intersection at about 1:20 p.m.
>According to police, both vehicles were travelling west on Lake Shore Blvd. W. when one vehicle turned left across the path of the other to proceed south on Bay St.
So the actual injuries to pedestrians were an example of collateral damage from people screwing up while behind the wheel.
The author does embark on a secondary train of thought, highlighting a bit of trivia that people may not know abouut the local traffic regulations:
>How pedestrians interpret the newer countdown-type pedestrian signals is becoming a major concern for police, said Const. Hugh Smith of traffic services. Many don’t really understand what the timer means.
>Apparently their handbook states that once the countdown starts, they assume no new pedestrians should enter the crosswalk, thereby allowing vehicles to execute turns once the initial group clears.
I didn't personally read it as blaming the pedestrians for getting hurt, as it seemed like a more Public Service Announcement sort of thing tacked on the end, but I do agree that that could have been transitioned to or arranged better.
I've just been around placeswith some fairly militant anti-motoring sentiment (like do away with all motorways type), so I assure you it is a thing. I think Britain was having some troubles with it in London, and it's growing in popularity around some urban centers in the U.S.
It tends to go hand-in-hand with zoning (which is a nightmare in and of itself), and has a great deal of impact on your ability to freely get places in the U.S., which is why I always try to be sensitive to trying to counterweight the "change it now" crowd to "incremental implementation".
I don't mind public transit, but I'm very againnst throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It's not so much anti-motorist propaganda, but rather street safety advocacy to remind drivers that 'accidents' are mostly avoidable.
I don't have any news stories at the ready, but next time you see an article like 'Man, 30, dead after being hit by SUV' take a look at the comment section. I guarantee there will be multiple people asking if he was outside of a crosswalk, or noting how people need to get off their phones when walking. There's usually an absence of talking about the driver, because usually they are not mentioned apart from 'the driver stayed on scene and is cooperating with the police'. Advocates of 'crash not accident' would like the headline to be rewritten such as 'Driver hits and kills 30-year-old man with SUV'. A headline like that hopefully leads people to question whether the driver was speeding, on their phone, etc.
So true.
Most times when I'm making a right turn and have to wait for a pedestrian to cross, I notice that they never look up. Somehow if you have the right of way, cars are magically supposed to obey that.
Better to be in one piece than be right.
In consistently dangerous intersections it can actually be much safer not to cross at the crosswalk. You are basically in a situation where it is perceived as safe because you expect the cars to stop; however, if they don't stop, you are immediately in trouble with no exit.
Same effect: As a bike it is dangerous to go at the green light. If there is a gap, going at the red light makes that you can ensure all dangers are addressed; At the green light you are in the middle of the traffic, cars are turning right without seeing you, or go straight but squeeze their right, or you end up between two lanes.
I can’t wait till all cars use positively reinforced computer vision to slam the brakes when anticipating human impact, coupled with intelligent inferences from gps intersection coordinate, senses the red light or stop sign, lack of flow of traffic from surrounding vehicles in your direction and movement in opposite direction.
That is until we get L4(?) autonomous cars. People should not be getting hit by cars in 2021, why is this not solved yet?! C’mon car manufacturers, use your billions in revenue to solve these ‘human driver error resulting in death’ class of problems instead of distracting drivers even more by removing usable tactile buttons for affordance-less touchscreens and shaving off a few cents in production costs.
Especially fire safety seems like something people don't realize. Sure, the rules can seem overly strict and sometimes even nonsensical on the first glance, but it's insane how fast the situation can go from "smale flame" to "house on fire". Seeing the worst case play out is really eye-opening.
I don't think it was LiveLeak, but seeing the footage of the Station Nightclub fire online was enough to permanently change how I view crowds and indoor spaces. That stuff is quite scarring - but I'm grateful for the knowledge.
Agreed. After seeing that video, any time I'm in a crowded indoor space, I always make sure I take a look around for the nearest fire exit, as well as a couple of alternatives in case it is blocked.
Watching an American beheading by either drug cartels or some random Middle East country properly fucked my head up at the ripe age of 12 or 13.
I too experienced the phenomenon of feeling the media was downplaying the extent of the sheer and utter devastation that comes with war and invading countries. That video shook me good and still haunts me to this day… It made me aware of the atrocities of life and wanting to be more involved in politics to make the world a less barbaric place.
Not from liveleak, but a couple of years ago I read an article about a guy that got stuck in a cave a few km from the entrance after falling head-first into a crevice, and eventually died because nobody could get him out. It gave me nightmares for weeks, and even to this day just thinking about it makes me shudder. It's almost PTSD, even though I only read a second-hand retelling.
Last year I was leaving my house to walk my dogs when my neighbors dog jumped their fence and attacked my dog. I had airpods in, so I didn't hear anything until my dog literally screamed. I was able to turn around and hold my dog steady until my neighbor hopped his fence and got his dog off.
Overall it could have been much worse; I have friends that have much worse stories. My dog had a handful of puncture wounds that healed up, and he is fine now. I am pretty sure I had PTSD or something close to it; mainly it's waking from nightmares of the scenario, and thinking of my dogs scream still makes me shudder/feel sick. I also now walk outside and check my yard before letting the dogs out and stay out there with them the entire time. My neighbor is working on getting a fence now that the spring is here, but even then I don't know if I will leave the dogs out alone. It was a minor encounter with violence, but it was enough to shake me up and change some habits.
Having experienced this far too many times (dogs jumping fences!) I now carry a few compressed air devices (“Pet Convincer” is a repurposed CO2 tire inflator that blasts air) to scare off-leash dogs away without hurting your dog accidentally via other less humane methods (pepper spray, tazer, etc).
Not quite as rough as you had it, but growing up with parents in the medical field, they could and would easily recount all the nasty injuries and deaths they had seen in accidents (or homicides).
Suffice to say I am firmly in favor of wearing safety equipment even for "simple" jobs, and trying to avoid pissing people off.
I remember seeing that video of American special forces being shot down in Africa. I did my due in the army myself, but thankfully I never saw combat. I do know a lot of vets, tho, and... they've all got PTSD and many of them are in a very bad shape. After seeing that video, I've been even more thankful. For me it serves as a clear warning that joining the army isn't all glory, even if you're fighting for "the right side" or the most powerful army in the world. Also if the war is on the other side of the world, perhaps ask yourself if this is something you'd really like to give your life for.
The "other side of the world" wars are mostly fought by the young, because they haven't developed enough skepticism to ask whether what they're being asked to do benefits the country as a whole, or only certain actors and industries. The old and rich start wars, the young and poor fight them.
The old, rich, and stupid. One of the things that has been blowing my mind recently is the awareness of how many wars happen as a result of accident, miscommunication, and institutional inertia. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour started off as a hypothetical 'how could we win a potential war with the US', then over time, gained so much momentum that even though its principal architect thought it was a very bad idea, and although it was obviously not in Japan's national interest, it ended up going ahead.
Wasn't there a whole ordeal with competing entities, even within national organizations and army branches, who were all zealously entrenched in their own little jurisdictions?
That too - but that's present in any state. Japan just had the weirdest combination of resting all authority in the emperor, while having a strong tradition of the emperor never exercising any practical authority. So you get stuff like the creation of a puppet state in Manchuria essentially against the will of the Japanese prime minister.
I think the basic structure of a leader that theoretically has absolute power, but practically speaking is a kind of empty suit, is actually pretty generalizable and common. Japan is an extreme example, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Iraq war was the result of a similar combination of institutional momentum and leadership vacuum[0].
I am not a native speaker of English so my apology if the question sounds strange: but does that mean that you feel that you owe your country some time spent in the army? ("I served in the army as everyone else" vs "I was employed in the army because of my choice").
Your last sentence rather points to the former but I wanted to make sure.
> These “boring” things take on more importance when you can see what happens when you ignore them.
Couldn't agree more.
When I was a 7 years old, a road near my home was undergo an expansion. The work involves a lots of heavy and big machines, including heavy trucks etc. During that time, me and almost all other kid was warned to not go near those machines, "Don't play near those things, it's dangerous". But none of us knows why, so none of us listened, at least not carefully.
Many years later, after I've grow up and start to understand the value of lives, one day I stumble upon a video showing a middle school aged student ridding a bike down a road, and got crashed by a turning lorry. And the lorry driver didn't even notice the student until a terrified security guard yelled him to stop. That kid was crashed at the left abdomen, then the wheel rolled over his chest and head, all with in 3 seconds of time.
That moment is when I suddenly remembered the warning that I got almost 20 years ago: Don't play near those things, it's dangerous. Everything is so real now, because it is, it's just that I didn't receive it at it's full meaning back then, and that video, completed it.
Video like those really works, because now you saw it with your own eyes. You feel the brutality without a layer of filter, and without even a slight distortion, and then you know it for real.
> Many years later, after I've grow up and start to understand the value of lives, one day I stumble upon a video showing a middle school aged student ridding a bike down a road, and got crashed by a turning lorry
Unfortunately, this is a relatively common way for cyclists to die. The easy way to prevent it is to never try to pass a truck/lorry near an intersection.
What most shocking fact it, the driver didn't even notice the poor kid. The blind spot that people constantly talking about is real and many people lose their life to it.
Sad thing is, most people I know don't know about anything of it, they still assumes that the driver will take care of everything.
Even if there's a car ahead of a lorry at a red light, I'll stick a few feet behind the lorry until I can pass it mid-block. Big truck drivers have so much to pay attention to while city driving, it's easy to forget that cyclists exist.
I remember they used to show bad car crashes as part of the training you could take to reduce the number of penalty points (Polish road code, accumulate 24, lose your driving license). My colleague, who was a bit of a petrolhead, took it. It made him drive safe(r) at least for a few weeks.
Safety is in bad company these days because it's so often (I'd say 10:1, probably even 100:1) presented by people who have ulterior self serving motives (typically they have no skin in the game and are just in it for the virtue points).
It's one thing to have a driver's ed instructor, your plant manager or someone else in a position of authority who presumably knows what they're talking about and has at least some semblance of skin in the game show you those things and lecture you about safety.
Listening to a bunch of Redditors and HNers and Youtube commenters, etc, etc. grandstand nonstop about safety, safety, safety, safety, even when the relevance of and pretext for such grandstanding is very flimsy is counterproductive.
You can't post about <subject> on the internet these days without some jerk swooping in and making some borderline irrelevant comment about safety in order to score cheap virtue points which then derails everything. Heck, just discussing it at the work lunch table there's a 50-50 chance the same derailment happens in real life.
Being told you need to worry about not electrocuting yourself when changing a tire on Prius or you need to worry about carbon monoxide when lighting a single candle doesn't make people care about safety. It rightly makes them annoyed and suspicious.
What a strange and cynical view to hold. Maybe people talk about safety out of a genuine care of others? Or maybe they are into doing things safely and like to share that.
My American school in the 1990s showed “Signal 30” in Driver’s Education class, a gruesome documentary film from the 60s showing deceased, disfigured victims in automobile accidents. Totally messed up to show kids that.
It's weird that phrasing the reality of it is considered distasteful. "Child killed in collision with vehicle" is sanitary. "Driver smashes child's brain with their bumper" less so. Yet we might not let drivers get away with killing 40,000 people a year in the US if we spoke clearly about it.
Road safety advocates have been lobbying journalists to use 'crash not accident' for years. Even here on HN many people shoot that down as anti-motorist. People like their cars/trucks and don't like being reminded of their danger and responsibility.
Yes I think a few videos is enough. I still have images in my head kind haunting me but like you said it’s a good thing. Same with animal condition (don’t know if you find that here). But more than that I wouldn’t play with the psychological consequences.
Liveleak doesn't portray the reality of war because it shows you some beheading. Voyeurism and gore are not the same as genuine insight into what scary and violent places are actually like. It's worth reading Baudrillard's 'The Gulf War Did Not Take Place' on how media representation, and stylized, selective footage is used to distort. You didn't get to know the 'reality' of war, but the hyper-reality of it.
If you were to actually go see the reality of war what you'd see most of the time is actually soldiers doing nothing, not interating with any enemy. People trying to scrape by, someone fixing a pipe, that kind of thing. LiveLeak was even worse and a better source for propaganda than sensational news.
Man those essays are some hot garbage. If you read them, you come away thinking that the US just decided to attack Iraq to make a point to Saddam. Let me quote it
> Unlike earlier wars, in which there were political aims either of conquest or domination, what is at stake in this one is war itself: its status, its meaning, its future.
A beautiful sentence, but Saddam invaded Kuwait with the intent of conquering it. The essays would better be titled “Kuwait does not exist”.
Baudrillard himself freely admitted at the time that his work was not meant to be taken as "political analysis," or even poetry. He is quoted as suggesting it be read as a SF novel, even :)
I usually don't read French philosophers, but when I do, I simply take it as an elaborate language game. It's like enjoying any team sport, where when one players says, "we are going to crush them!", it's generally not an actual plan involving physical crushing. In this case, I see Baudrillard simply using the idea of the Gulf War, to make a point about the larger context in which it took place - the media images, the self-stylings of various leaders, how it was commented on, etc. It was the world's first "cable news war," and while Baudrillard was not alone in noticing this at the time, certainly he had anticipated it in his previous writings on simulacra and hyper-reality.
I really love Baudrillard's writing and I'm particularly fond of America. But, I do take issue with this idea of "the larger context in which it took place" being the American media. When the context in which took place, is Saddam beginning his plan of conquering the middle east. He's not wrong about the American Media, but he really does go three essays about the gulf war, without mentioning Kuwait.
I made that phrase up, though Baudrillard would probably have somewhat agreed - at any rate, he was a cultural critic, so he wasn't interested in the geopolitical causes of events, and more the "semiotic" causes, so to speak. I can't think of the right word here, I am not a sociologist/media studies major, but it's something like, How do the cultural symbols prevalent at the time and the media in which they are expressed form our notion of "the thing that happened."
Yes, there is one way of answering the question, like you say, which is, Saddam invades Kuwait for oil, and the US has to take action to restore the geopolitical balance in the area. For a post-modern philosopher, the interesting tack is more like, "The recognition by the administration of the opportunity to turn this into a show worth watching about American heroism is what drove the sequence of events."
> Baudrillard himself freely admitted at the time that his work was not meant to be taken as "political analysis," or even poetry. He is quoted as suggesting it be read as a SF novel, even :)
Sounds an awful lot like Alex Jones. "I'm just asking a question, talkin about hypotheticals".
If you toss out a theory and then suggest it should be read as fiction then it's got about as much value to anyone as Klingon philosophy. And the Klingons are a lot more consistent than most Continental philosophy.
I have read no Klingon philosophy but I have no doubt it's way more consistent than Continental philosophy - possibly because it describes a made-up world, which can be shaped to the philosophy, rather than the other way round.
With all continental philosophy, my general attitude is that the best approach is to see it as an attempt to narrate the human condition rather than to theorize about it, in the strict sense. And yes, it's impossible to know which mode a particular Continental philosopher is in. As in, just how seriously is this dude taking himself? (it's mostly dudes.) We can tell from accounts of their lives that they were pretty serious in their pursuits of course - maybe not the French as much, certainly the Germans and Scandinavians.
Comparing this philosophy to demagoguery is a bit of a cheap insult mostly because the Continental philosophers weren't trying to rile the masses up. Maybe Nietzsche made the most serious attempt at doing so, though I think most of his work gained prominence posthumously.
I think the comparison to sci-fi is apt - SF writers perhaps are the most self conscious about the metaphysical implications of their subject matter or storylines, out of all writers, I'd say. But seeing as so much of that era was really a response to the vacuum left by the decline in Christianity's influence, it couldn't help being somewhat bizarre and self-contradictory. It's a tough act to follow if you aren't going to let yourself rely on divine intervention, and have to be the bastard child of Enlightenment thought as well as a millennia of Christian metaphysics. So of course, so much of it sounds like some kooky alien story.
I never came away thinking these things after reading those essays.
The novel insights he presents in these essays deal with the West's ability to structure the narrative - via mass-media - of the Gulf War, resulting in the very real and senseless violence that occurred. All the while for the citizens of those Western nations though, none of the "Vietnam effect" was witnessed.
In a sense, your post proves his point quite adeptly, because you immediately made reference to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, insinuating that the West had some sort of obligation to act with further terror & violence. The Gulf War was not Saddam's act of turning Kuwait into literally hell [0], but rather the West's shameful leveraging of mass media to conduct abhorrent uses of overwhelming technological force to destroy an entire region of the world.
Since this war began and ended, the US has "conquered" five or so states in the Middle East-North Africa region. Should somebody have rightfully stepped in and stopped us from engaging in these conquests?
technically it did. realistically it hasn't for those who live there? (see also Afghanistan where the women and children now get to enjoy the mess and radicalization the US left behind). Maybe Iraq ended because we decided not to look at it any more?
> Should somebody have rightfully stepped in and stopped us from engaging in these conquests?
not sure if it would have made a difference, the real question IMO is Should they have intervened in the first place?. My own opinion has shifted in the past 20 years or so from supporting the West to step in and "do something! please anything to make it stop", to "how dare they suggest anything without cleaning up their own filthy disgusting hypocrite acts first". I believe the only way to make the West better is to implement change in our own society first (that is if we really want to have the audacity to lecture others). We can still use economic pressure to fight things but the moment our dear leaders suggest "pre-emptive strikes" there will be hypocrisy and injustice.
Also these events don't happen (didn't happen) in a vacuum. In this specific case the US can be blamed for repeating the same mistake[1] which the UK colonial powers decades before made when they invented "modern Iraq" by supporting niche groups and placing them into a position of power. In a way this is like somebody invading and toppling the US-regime in 2021, not understanding anything about the country, and giving the nuclear codes to the Amish (not that there is anything wrong with Amish culture or tradition but they do not represent the majority of the people). The US then propped up an illegitimate regime due to ignorance of the actual power dynamics in the local society at the time.
“Economic pressure” also kills children and brings suffering to the people.
The fact is that the US has bankrolled or committed itself atrocities just as gruesome as any of the “evil dictators” against which our media drums up popular fervor. Look into what we did in the Marshall Islands, for instance, (documented in the film The Coming War on China) or what we bankrolled in Chile under Pinochet.
But let’s not pretend our opinions have any significance in these matters. An end to endless war is not on the ballot. All we can do is face the reality that our state and media are run by this sort of cynical cretin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
Facing the reality I mentioned is the only opinion that matters. From there we can start to talk about building something new. Otherwise, have all the anti-war protests and activism in the last 20-30 years curtailed the US war machine one bit?
The things you have said make me feel engaging with you is a waste of time, as my opinions don't matter, and it's all futile and hopeless.
You talk of "we" and "us"—"facing the reality" you describe being "all we can do". Maybe just speak for yourself? I don't feel included in your "we", and don't want to be. It sounds like you have such definite opinions that talking with you won't help anything. ...Maybe that is the real unchangeable reality here, your certainty that you're right?
I didn’t say it was all futile and hopeless. I have a lot of hope, but maybe in a different direction than you do. And my opinions on these issues have developed significantly even in the last year. I’m always open to new understanding.
But the US has been at war my entire adult life, and it has a very long history of brutality abroad. I’m pragmatic about what changing that will require.
No, you just have the same way of thinking as Chomsky, where you're so anti-imperialist that everything the US does is bad. Even when it's good. The invasion of Iraq can be bad and the gulf war can be good, there's no contradiction here. Go to Kuwait and ask someone who was alive during the gulf war, if they think it was about "the West's shameful leveraging of mass media to conduct abhorrent uses of overwhelming technological force to destroy an entire region of the world."
The Gulf War has nothing to do with Kuwait. We did not use overwhelming technological force on Kuwait. We used it on Iraq.
Once again, you demonstrate how warmongers cannot ever justify these abhorrent actions in the MENA region without invoking the highly dubious altruism of "we gotta punish the bad guys." The obvious need for the Gulf War from the 1990s warmonger point of view was the unprecedented post-Cold-War military buildup that was not only terribly unnecessary but has led to the loss of innumerable lives all over the globe thanks to our orgy of violence, ongoing to this day, called the War on Terrorism. But it did line the pockets of the shareholders of Raytheon and Boeing.
In a certain sense, this also helped line the pockets of Noam Chomsky, with whom I agree on very little beyond war. And even there, he's a complex thinker and I have many disagreements. Why would you try to pigeonhole and dismember my argument by placing me in the same category as Chomsky? You may think it's fine second-handing this issue and passing the buck to bigger names than yours, but instead of that, why don't you try arguing the merits of your ideas directly? Explain why millions of dead women & children were worth the "white lie" of the Gulf War being all about punishing the actions of Saddam in Kuwait?
A LiveLeak showing how people sitting in offices design these narratives and sell them to the public would be genuinely revolutionary - especially if it also showed uncensored video of the gore and horror of the results.
IMO Baudrillard and the rest of Critical Theory are absolutely useless at this.
The language is obscure, self-indulgent, self-aggrandising, and exclusive. Instead of revealing the reality of how these thing work it has the opposite effect of making them even more obscure, arcane, and distant - except for a tiny, tiny minority of self-styled insiders who feel like they have privileged secret insight which flatters their moral and intellectual vanity.
The insight is useless and illusory unless it changes mass awareness and mass behaviour. Baudrillard, Lyotard, and the rest have made a terrible contribution to making that less, not more, likely.
Some friends of mine and I are working through Simulacra and Simulation. It takes us about 30 minutes to get through three sentences, while we parse the horrible word choice and ridiculously obfuscating sentence structure.
Luckily, once we've created our interpretation of what he's saying, it seems very smart, and we certainly couldn't have done it without him.
The blog "The Last Psychiatrist" does a lot of Baudrillard-style commentary.
You can grow up, go to school, make friends, fall in love, fall out of love, graduate, move, make new friends, learn to cook, fall back in love, buy a home, get a job, get a new job, learn to paint, fix that leak in the kitchen...
And then a car bomb goes off while you're walking by and all that time spent is gone.
But that’s life. I have 2 friends that died in a car accident. They were in their mid-20s. A split second accident. If they didn’t drive that night, they probably would never get as close to death as they did that night. But it happened and all their efforts were erased in a second. It’s not just war that causes that.
The difference is not only the scale of things but especially that a war is caused by people, on purpose, too often with the consent of their population.
American driver education and testing are notoriously lax compared to much of the world; make driver testing more intensive and frequent.
Traffic enforcement is geared more towards municipal income generation and the facilitating of searches and arrests for other crimes than toward ensuring safe driving; stop pulling over poor people to search for drugs and start photographing and billing middle class and rich people for speeding or for idling in the middle/passing lane.
Car manufacturers jack up the price on critical safety features and make it difficult to retrofit them into existing vehicles; regulate them.
Our roadways are often designed poorly, mixing use cases in ways that result in unnecessary injury (e.g., "stroads" and intersections with poor pedestrian design); regulate and fix those.
Take care driving as serious as aviation. Mandatory dash cams to make it easier to assign blame, automatic sensors which alert police when they detect the driver is behaving erratically. Make it easy to report other drivers for bad behavior (sitting on someone else's bumper, brake checking them, cutting them off, jersey lane swapping) which results in mandatory training or points off their license.
This is the only response I have seen to my question that could maybe change things - specifically having automatic sensors in every vehicle that automatically alert police when you do something dangerous. I think this would be unrealistic to implement, but assuming you could, it would probably help (assuming sensor data could be used as proof of bad driving).
As for reporting bad driving, you really need proof of a person's bad driving if you're going to penalize them for it. Having more traffic cameras helps a bit, but people just learn where the cameras are and drive carefully when they know they are being filmed.
Your tone suggests you can't imagine any, which is... surprising. There are a vast array of things you can do to make driving safer, at the cost of making it less accessible and/or more expensive. Different countries already set their threshold differently - in the US, a driving test takes 20 minutes and everyone passes, while in the UK it takes 40 minutes and most people fail the first time. And lo and behold, 4 times fewer accidents per capita in the UK - despite narrower roads and overwhelmingly manual transmissions.
I guess I didn't ask the right question here. My issue is with the statement "the vast majority of accidents are due to bad policy". I would disagree with this statement. Some people occasionally make bad decisions when they drive or get distracted and cause accidents. How do you create a policy to keep people from occasionally getting distracted or making a risky choice. You can't. Most people who are driving in a risky manner know how to drive safely, know that their behavior is not appropriate and they do it anyway because they don't care or think they can get away with it. Almost every person I have met who is a bad driver says something like "it's a risk I'm willing to take" or "I know the risks" without any thought about the fact that their behavior is putting others at risk as well. The only thing that usually changes these people's behavior is getting in an accident, at which point you just hope they didn't injure someone else too badly. Even then, I know of people who have been in accidents who still drive horribly. I'm convinced the problems are more cultural than anything else.
People are people everywhere, I'm sure plenty of drivers in e.g. Sweden get distracted or make bad choices - indeed Swedish road design policy is that road design should explicitly accommodate that. "Culture" is a lazy non-explanation, and wouldn't explain why e.g. the Netherlands had similarly high collision rates in the 1970s, but now doesn't - not because their culture is less American now (at least, I can't see how such a claim is at all defensible), but because of deliberate policy changes.
You can't prevent all distraction or all bad choices, but you can reduce collision rates by at least a factor of 20 or so with the right policy choices - we know because these other countries have done it. So I think it's fair to say that the majority of collisions are caused by not making those policy choices.
So you are saying Americans are just worse drivers? America has more car accidents per capita than similarly dense countries with different policies. One policy is to make public transit better, that reduces accidents a lot since it gets people off the roads. Another policy is stricter tests as talked about above. The end result is way less accidents entirely thanks to policies.
> despite narrower roads and overwhelmingly manual transmissions.
You say this like you'd expect manual transmissions to increase the accident rates? If anything I'd suspect the opposite - much harder to be distracted on your phone, eating food, etc when you need both hands to be able to drive. It also keeps your mind more engaged if you're shifting gears all the time (obviously doesn't apply to highway driving where you can sit in the same gear for miles on end but at least my intuition tells me the highway isn't where most accidents occur).
> You say this like you'd expect manual transmissions to increase the accident rates?
I agree with you! But manual transmissions don't necessarily work as you'd assume - my brother at 18 could text or have a soda and shift at the same time. Similarly, we can end up at our destinations without remembering exactly all the steps - it's become automatic.
That said, most people feel there's less need for following distance when it's an automatic - that's what I consider a bad and dangerous habit.
> That said, most people feel there's less need for following distance when it's an automatic - that's what I consider a bad and dangerous habit.
That's an interesting way to phrase it so I'm curious what you mean. I have long thought that it would be nice if more people drove manual because then they would try and regulate their speed a bit more to minimize shifts, eg in stop and go traffic I'd prefer going 3 miles/hour for 20 seconds than 10 miles/hour but fully stopping every 2 car lengths, or when you see a red light ahead, most people stay their current speed and then stop quickly rather than slowing in order for it to change to green before they have to fully stop.
Is that the concept you're getting at with the following distance thing (since longer following distance gives more room to keep a consistent speed) or are you getting at something else?
I think we assume the same thing, but use different examples. Were manual transmissions more common, people would presumably try to minimize shifting.
My example (major gripe) is city driving. Coasting instead of actually stopping (as you come up on a line of cars at a light that just turned green) means you minimize shifting, but it requires a buffer of a couple dozen meters. It just isn't possible when you're too close.
Increase the testing requirements for new drivers to make it harder to get a license, for starters. Or make it easier to suspend people's licenses for acts of unsafe driving.
America has extremely low requirements to get licensed as a driver; this is intentional. We wanted everyone out of public transit and into cars. In other countries it's far more difficult to get licensed to drive, you're expected to have more skills. Hell, most drivers in Europe drive stick because you're required to test on a manual transmission.
Much stricter requirements for getting (and keeping) your drivers license. Policies focusing on reducing drunk driving (both focusing changing attitudes, increasing the risk of getting caught and increasing the punishments for people caught). More consistent and continuous enforcement of existing driving laws. You can probably do more to get unsafe cars off the roads. There is a lot you can do around designing roads and traffic flows in ways that reduce the risk of accidents.
> Separate bike lanes, more like the sidewalks, not just painted lines on the car roads.
That actually leads to more collisions at intersections.
The reason that sidewalks work for pedestrians is because they move at walking speed. That means its easy for drivers to see them approaching an intersection (since they're a short distance away).
Cyclists, on the other hand, move far faster than a walking pedestrian and can be much further away from the intersection where a motorist isn't looking and still can end up in a collision.
The best policy is to have cyclists integrate with vehicular traffic, because cyclists are vehicles, just like motorcyclists.
Cycles can't as a general rule keep up with cars, unlike motorcycles. There's no integrating them with auto traffic whether or not you force them into the same roadway.
Part of good separate path design is planning the intersections to prevent the sort of crashes you're describing. I've seen some designs that make sense - it's rather interesting actually what nuances go into safe intersection design. I don't have any links available offhand though.
> There's no integrating them with auto traffic whether or not you force them into the same roadway.
Roads can accommodate traffic moving at different speeds. For example, buses and trucks consistently move slower than passenger vehicles, especially up grades, but drivers of faster vehicles simply change lanes to pass them. This works on interstates where drivers of passenger vehicles are going 70 to 90 mph and commercial vehicles are going 40 to 60 mph.
Similarly, on a surface street with traffic moving anywhere from 0 to 40 mph, cyclists moving 0 to 20 mph can similarly integrate with traffic with faster drivers changing lanes to pass them.
> Part of good separate path design is planning the intersections to prevent the sort of crashes you're describing.
I've read about the designs, but the assumptions that they make do not really hold. For example, the typical "protected" intersection with curb extensions and an offset assumes that a motorist will look down the bike path to check for cyclists before exiting an intersection while moving at 10 mph. In reality, drivers aren't going to do that.
As I noted earlier, this principle works with pedestrians, because, while walking, they're moving around 5 feet per second, so seeing a pedestrian 10 feet away from the intersection is pretty easy for a driver making a turn since they really don't have to look down the sidewalk.
In contrast, a cyclist is moving anywhere from 15 to 30 feet per second. A cyclist that's two seconds away from entering an intersection can be anywhere from 30 to 60 feet away. This requires a drivers to actually look down the bike path, which isn't always going to occur. The cyclist may assume that the turning driver has seen them, but that assumption is in correct, and the cyclist will have to slow rapidly to avoid a collision.
Also, a lot of cyclists, when making use of such infrastructure, believe that they have pedestrian style right of way, meaning that they will do things like ride around the front of a turning vehicle believing that they'll stop to avoid a collision instead of just yielding.
A typical person takes about a second or so to react to something unexpected. At 10 mph, the motorist has already covered 16 feet, meaning that they would collide with a cyclist before they have a chance to even press the brake pedal.
Car accidents are caused by people, by a system kept in place on purpose, and most the population is made dependent on them in many countries, in that there is no choice but to make oneself at risk of a car "accident".
But the deadly acts in war are meant to be deadly, meant to kill people. Most people aren’t trying to kill others even if they’re essentially forced to drive in a car-centric society. The killing is almost always accidental and unintended.
There's a part of me that that thinks there are no accidents. Yes--that whole Freud thing.
As I have aged, I do think their are accidents, and life is a gamble. It has always bothered me the rich can afford to take chances, but that's another story.
I still think it's best to think you can control your fate with most acccidents though.
In high school, and college, I drove without insurance. (California used to require auto insurance, but didn't mandate it at DMV. I honestly couldn't afford it.)
I used to think of driving as walking on a cliff's edge. You just don't make a mistake. It did work, but I probally got very lucky too.
With car design, function and ownership as they are, we (the people) accept that there is an uncommonly high risk of a crash and serious injury to ourselves and to the general public.
We only call it an "accident" to abrogate that responsibility.
On the point about scale: some wikipedia browsing suggests road traffic deaths currently kill about 10 times as many people as wars, globally.
You could argue that anything is an accident. Can you stop a war after it starts? Hardly. Can you stop a war before it starts? Hardly. Same as for car accidents. You could be smart and attentive, foster an environment unsupportive of accidents, but in the end we're not conscious enough to exert such control.
That's the scary thing about life, not war in particular. Everything you just said applies to everyone alive right now. What difference does a few decades make?
Isn’t it actually an issue that soldiers are so bored in completely remote places for months and months?
People engaging in the army to get some hot action sure would have liked to know more about that aspect, and for better or worse the general public’s perception would also be different when accurately imagining x thousands of trained people stuck in the desert doing nothing 99% of the time.
Both points of view are necessary, but one is more important than the other.
The bigger deal is that in its inherent brutality, there should be a high bar for war, and that is something that people need constant reminding of.
The other is mostly a matter of public expenditure and the fact that military service is basically a form of welfare that's more palatable to many people, even if it boils down to paying people to work out and carry boxes around in a far away desert.
>Liveleak doesn't portray the reality of war because it shows you some beheading.
What it did is give people a glimpse at the horrible results of war - a glimpse that (before sites like liveleak) most people in the USA had not been allowed to see on the "news" since the Vietnam war. Its one thing to hear a throwaway line on the evening news about more air strikes in a far off country and quite another thing to see the results of an air strike. To see the bodies ripped and torn and the lives that are destroyed. Binging on these sort of horrible images is not useful or healthy but everyone should be exposed to them at least once to understand what the consequences of war look like.
I think soldiers should see this as part of their training
I served in the British Army and before I went out to Afghanistan I'd watch all of the gory Middle East stuff because I wanted to know what I was getting myself in for. Also to see the kind of situations that had killed my friend.
I'm glad I did, because although most of it was extremely boring stuff like you describe I probably would have brushed off the capabilities of the Taliban
Then CNN and BBC defiantly show the reality of war aka, guys with machine guns shooting at the sky so the reporter can pretend he is near the frontlines.
Sorry man, but every bit of that book (and everything else jean baudrillard wrote) is fashionable nonsense. Hyperreality is a bankrupt useless concept and has no basis in reality. Baudrillard tries to sound profound but really just sounds like a post modernist schizo like the rest of his contemporaries
Unfortunately, you're not right. The world is moving into text. What matters is the effects words have, not their truth. Brexit and Trump are significant evidence of this, but there's a lot more. Today, online bullying is probably a bigger problem for teenagers than offline, and that's because they live more of their lives online. They are literally moving into the simulation, a place constructed out of allusion and conjunction of symbols.
Consider all the fighting over words in what the right likes to call the woke. Symbolism, not the real, is bigger than ever and getting more important every day.
> Brexit and Trump are significant evidence of this
Brexit is the new heresy apparently. What if I told you the EU was the "false words"? The representation of Brexit as racist was certainly an emotive argument.
It's powerful, important content, but collecting and promoting it as shock entertainment, entirely out of context, doesn't strike me as the right way to do it. Our media's lack of willingness to portray the human cost of our overseas exploits is clearly a huge problem, but I don't think this really addressed it. It's all impact without usable information.
While incredibly violent things do happen in the world regularly— and we should not be ignoring them— the world is safer than it has ever been, and that should also be front-and-center in people's minds when considering this. People predominantly concerned with the scariness and violence in the world will be more likely to promote overly violent responses to relatively innocuous situations through war, policy, policing, etc.
I wish there was a publicly accessible, nonprofit archive a la Wikileaks that focused on similar content including oversight for things like privacy issues. It would be nice to see citizen pundits paying attention to it for issues that matter to them and putting things in context as they're shared instead just blasting streams of violence at people.
But wish in one hand and successfully monetize in the other and see which one fills up first...
WatchPeopleDie was supposed to do this. I wish the mods had been better about the garbage comments, but even then I think the reddit admins were hell-bent on shutting down any subs they didn't personally like.
But I agree fullheartedly. Seeing such things really made me 'feel' how precious life is and how terrible the world can be. It helped me navigate moving to Europe a few times, even.
I really think for something like a violent video archive to do as much good as possible, it needs to be entirely grant funded. Aside from the obviously problematic approach of monetizing violence, I don't think you can be too heavy-handed in protecting privacy with this sort of thing. Though I wonder how this might change with deepfake videos gaining momentum. I think the entire venture would be really expensive to do well.
Your response comes across as needlessly antagonistic.
My work is entirely grant funded and to my knowledge, none of it comes from the government— at least not directly. I'm positive that some of those private non-profits receive government assistance to some extent for operating expenses and whatnot, but the funds themselves are not tax-sourced.
Beyond that, governments fund libraries and archives at every level and they deliberately have all sorts of collections, from completely benign to completely odious. Funding a deliberately sensationalist aggregator and monger of violence would be plainly obnoxious, but appropriately managed archives are in the public's best interest. Probably even more so for controversial content. I'm not sure how this would be any different.
Ugh. Having the ability to comment really does add an entirely new dimension to a service, but a culture of bad comments can be so disheartening, and it seems like a tough cancer to treat.
As a species, we need a pretty wide distribution of experience and approaches or we’re essentially a monoculture waiting for the right set of circumstances to catch us unprepared and fail completely.
As terrible as folks are who would laugh at someone getting sucked into an industrial grinder, they’d be untroubled by anxiety or worry and associated mental issues in a Mad Max type post apocalyptic wasteland and hence more able to survive.
At least that’s what I tell myself to help sleep at night.
Seems like a Mad Max type post apocalyptic wasteland would be a Mad Max type post apocalyptic wasteland rather than a cooperative, if rocky and uncomfortable re-establishment of a productive society specifically because of those people.
Memes can really get into your perceptions of things.
Nowadays I always pay particular attention when I see a video with someone wearing flipflops if it's real life camera footage. I'm always "waiting for the other shoe to drop," so-to-speak.
> The world is a scary and violent place. Without Liveleak, you might never feel it.
Counter-point; the world is mostly a neutral, even OK, place, with also violence in it. Our cognition is heavily biased towards saliencing and preserving the scary bits, and being exposed to a planet scale showcase of those bits does not necessarily make us wiser (e.g. better decision makers). At least for me personally it took a decade before I regretted having watered those flowers of morbid curiosity.
The redeeming quality of LiveLeak might be, however shocking the content was, it also had an inherent grounding in bare reality, compared to the narratively embellished one of mainstream media. The former is ultimately bound by rules of reality but the latter is only bound by what people are willing to believe in.
> People who live paycheck-to-paycheck with family or medical issues wouldn't agree with you.
You wouldn't know if you were talking to such a person right now without making a circular argument such that "a person without privilege cannot think the world is an OK place and since they think that they must be a person of privilege". Existence of depression and anxiety across all socioeconomic strata proves that logic wrong.
Hardly - rather that we normalize to whatever is going on in our environment, perceiving risk, danger, ok or not ok, etc. in a relative sense not an absolute one (minus adaptation time).
There is decently solid evidence too that where someone lands on the distribution for a given environment is mostly set at an early age, often with a strong genetic component.
In the case of depression and anxiety, at least in the view of CBT, there is always some sort of cognitive distortion at play. In other words, if the mental anguish originates from having taken a distorted view of the world, it wouldn't tell us anything if the world was an OK place or not to begin with.
The question that bothers me is whether the existence of such distorted views of the world tells us something about the world. After all, they did not arise in isolation - what distorted that person's perception and what's preventing it from correcting itself?
This is an interesting thought but the answer can be as simple as cognitive biases. The world around you could be a literal utopia but the depressed mind would still think life is hopeless.
The mind is the world though. If the mind is distorted, the world is distorted. They can't really be considered separate, because for that being their mind is the true reality.
Depression and anxiety are completely internal reactions, how oneself responds to the world. It does not matter if the world is good or not if your reaction is broken.
"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization." - Agent Smith
No, there is no circular argument. If someone thinks the world is an OK place, either they're speaking from a position of privilege or they are lying. Assuming privilege is in this case the kindest interpretation of their words.
> either they're speaking from a position of privilege or they are lying
I am not bothered that this is a false dichotomy as much as the fact that, intentional or not, it forbids taking a positive view of the world to anyone who also happens to be materially underprivileged.
> Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them. -Epictetus, Greek-born slave
> He spent his youth as a slave in Rome to Epaphroditos, a wealthy freedman and secretary to Nero.
> Epictetus obtained his freedom sometime after the death of Nero in AD 68
He was a slave to people of wealth and power, that permitted him to study philosophy, and was freed around 18 years of age. So it would be disingenuous to imply Epictetus had the perspective of an impoverished slave when he founded his own school of philosophy.
> So it would be disingenuous to imply Epictetus had the perspective of an impoverished slave when he founded his own school of philosophy.
Good thing is that I made no such implication. It would be equally disingenuous however to imply that his school of philosophy would be completely isolated from the experience of his formative years as a slave.
Most people simply attribute the author of the quote without qualifying or emphasizing some aspect of their life. So it seems arbitrary to mention this without any rhetorical motivation. Could have well said Greek Stoic Philosopher, which is mostly what he's known for and what the hive-mind of Wikipedia settled on
Indeed. It is incredibly telling when people attempt to equilibrate "I'm anxious because I'm not sure if I'll be promoted to senior dev this quarter" to "I'm anxious because I cannot feed my family". As someone who has come from the latter circumstances to the former (through a lot of luck and sweat), I can tell you that having the same roof over my head for long periods of time and not having to carefully budget every time I go grocery shopping is far more beneficial than most people would realize.
It’s pointing out that while objectively different, subjectively it’s often the same emotional weight - as counter intuitive as it may be - especially for those that don’t have prior experience or calibration in the objectively more serious environment.
In my experience (as someone who grew up with extensive food insecurity, parents who barely kept the family afloat, etc.), it’s hard NOT to have the bar shift too if you end up in a cushier place later. The promo can feel as bad as it used to feel not knowing where food was coming from, even if objectively that is ridiculous.
We’re very adaptable even if sometimes weirdly so.
>It’s pointing out that while objectively different, subjectively it’s often the same emotional weight - as counter intuitive as it may be - especially for those that don’t have prior experience or calibration in the objectively more serious environment.
This seems like incredibly useful behavior. When things improve it allows us to tackle new problems with similar conviction as before. It also helps us not get completely overwhelmed when we end up in worse and worse situations.
It is definitely a useful survival trait, and it certainly helps with the progress of the species.
Man does it suck sometimes though if you’re on the ‘push even if it hurts’ part of the spectrum!
Something that has helped me over time is the awareness that the stories we tell (both ourselves and others) are almost always post-facto attempts to rationalize what we fundamentally do not understand or control (our own thoughts and reactions, and those of others).
This is often for safety - both the illusion of control for ourselves, and to spin a safe and beneficial story for others to magnify the good or hide the bad of what happened. It gets even more interesting when the possibility of influencing others (or yourself!) to your benefit comes into play. Also a necessary and useful survival trait! There are a great many things it is helpful to believe that may be plainly contradicted by evidence.
If you cut away the noise produced by this process, ignore what people say, and look at action/reaction and reverse engineer it a bit - it almost always produces a far more reliable and predictable model for understanding people and the world overall.
Either way it takes a lot of experience and data points to have any accuracy, so it’s going to be confusing as hell for a long time. Especially if you haven’t figured out that almost everything anyone says (especially yourself!) is fundamentally self serving and post-facto - not due to malice even (though that happens), but because that’s the way it has to work!
I was not equipped for the type of psychological distress that comes from truly competitive academic / job endeavors. After acing my easy high school and going to a top uni for CS I became really despondent. I just felt like there should come a point when I "made it" and don't have any worries anymore.
Through a lot of reading and therapy I got better, but I agree that there is a tendency to move the goalposts and not be grateful for what one has. Even though it is more materially distressing to not know if/where/how one will eat, the problems usually have tangible solutions (e.g. go to grandma's house to eat...again, or know a sympathetic employee at some chain restaurant who will give you a bunch of unsold food that would otherwise be tossed). The problems to "how do I make the leap to become a senior dev?" are much more nebulous and uncertain, and indeed that is more psychologically distressing.
> It is incredibly telling when people attempt to equilibrate "I'm anxious because I'm not sure if I'll be promoted to senior dev this quarter" to "I'm anxious because I cannot feed my family".
Like it or not, the reality is that for some people, the anxiety of the latter is much greater than the anxiety some other people experience for the former.
Your experience may be the norm, but it is not all-encompassing, and your life experience doesn't give you the authority to speak on their behalf. While your experience and perspective may be the more common one, you are also dismissing a fair amount of suffering that many have.
There are people not far from me who handled poverty and war fairly well, became doctors, and eventually attempted/committed suicide because of the pressures on the job. One of the survivors even said that poverty and war were much simpler to comprehend than the hostility of his fellow doctors and the environment he worked in.
And no, it wasn't because of his background. Several of his coworkers attempted/committed suicide while coming from privileged backgrounds.
This is exactly the No True Scotsman. "No true unprivileged person would think this".
By your logic, if a slave who is tortured every day thinks the world is generally an OK place but his situation specifically sucks, they're speaking from a position of privilege.
Individuals suffer in many ways, so the "OK" part is all relative. Living in environment where you can get a paycheck is still OK compared to the extreme violence and destruction depicted on Liveleak. In other words, looking through the lens of a platform that curates extreme content is hardly representative of what goes on in most people's day-to-day lives around the world.
1000s of children die everyday due to diarrhoea caused by unclean water. About a 1 000 000 die every year from malaria mostly children. Just to name a few things.
The world is a hard unforgiving place for millions, we should never forget that.
> The world is a hard unforgiving place for millions, we should never forget that.
Agreed. But I'll go even further and say: we should keep the cruelty of the world in mind in order to a) fix it, or support those who try to fix it, and b) treasure the practices, institutions and technologies that shield us from suffering that fate.
If people in the Western world were more acutely aware of how life without clean water looks like, then maybe maintaining infrastructure wouldn't be that big of a problem it now is.
I absolutely agree with your points, but at the same time we can only worry about a fixed amount of things, and stress is very unhealthy — so from a purely mental well-being point of view, constantly thinking of all the bad things around the globe is not a good thing to do. Especially when we have a hard time actually effecting the given thing.
I don’t know what should be the solution, perhaps it would be the task of elected politicians to try to fix the problems in place of the population, even in other countries? Which do happen, but it should be much more prevalent.
Keep in mind, this is out of a population of 7.6 billion. Yes, lot of people die from terrible things. But the chance of someone suffering in the worst possible way (as depicted in those videos) is unlikely for most humans. That said, we could certainly do better.
The old age is where it sucks the most, and money/being privileged can only help so much. For example, even with money for great care, it is just torture to be mostly immobilized in bed, in pain, half-deaf and with mild dementia (this describes someone I personally know). And some variant of this is in the cards for a lot of us.
The book "Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think" [0] brings a different perspective to this conversation. I strongly encourage folks to read it, but if I had to summarize the point that feels relevant here, it'd go something like this.
Relative to the whole of human history, the time we're living in right now is by far the most neutral, even OK, (in some cases, even good) things have ever been.
You are correct that the divide between privileged/lucky and not is still wide. But arguably this is more about the uneven distribution of progress, and ignores the fact that poverty has significantly gone down, deaths from disease are significantly lower now than even 10-20 years ago, and so on.
This does not minimize or invalidate the fact that many do live in dangerous or "not OK" environments, but it's worth looking at the broader historical context to help contextualize that.
Yes, more change must happen. There is much progress to be made. But much progress has been made, and that should be acknowledged.
Actually, a significant portion of the videos portrayed the life of the homeless, the sick, people under the influence of drugs/alcohol, and other things that you don't usually find on the usual platforms.
I heard an interview once with a guy I don't remember, but he was a profuse traveller, and he said, no, the world is less dangerous than people think, and it all comes down to common sense. Whether New York City or Bogota - stay out of poorly lit places.
Is this to mean "People aren't killing themselves, ergo everything must be pretty good for them generally"? Because, if that's what's meant here, I have to pretty vehemently disagree with that sentiment.
The self-preservation instinct and general human will to live is strong enough to keep you going even in the absence of "enough good things". But good things aren't the only thing that balances out bad things, as anyone who has seen authoritarianism first hand could tell you. Bad things squared can work just as well.
For example, most religions have a taboo on suicide. "Your life sucks? Well tough shit bucko, you choose the easy way out and you end up in hell where it's infinitely worse forever." Absurd as it may sound, people can live against their will, too.
What are you comparing the world to to say a regular existence in it is not ok? That you think being a regular joe is not ok and worse than neutral tells me more about you than the other commenter imo.
>it also had an inherent grounding in bare reality, compared to the narratively embellished one of mainstream media
I disagree. It will only show one side of the bare reality, as the actions taken by more organized militaries will prevent their footage from ending up there. An Al Qaeda execution could end up on there, but the video of the execution of someone like Bin Laden rarely would.
Not really. Though they often did want a method to spread their videos, the West lacked any of the real context behind such videos turning it into outrage fueled Western propaganda. I expect the videos sparked far more Islamaphobia than radicalization.
I don't see that. That's like saying radical evangelicals have always wanted to increase hatred against Christianity. The relation between the 2 is that one acts as a recruiting ground for the other.
Radical evangelicals like radical Islam think they are the "pure form" of their religion.
I don't see how you can make that claim. The only possible benefit I can think of for them would be that more bigotry towards Muslims might sway more people towards their point if view, but they were already in close contact with a population thoroughly abused by the West in Iraq.
I remember crying watching 9/11 happen via live stream. My daughter was just about to be born a couple of days later.
Then a war with pretense based on fake evidence. Then Libya, Iraq destroyed, another one in Syria raging until today. Muslims marginalized and placed on no-fly lists. Prisoners in Abu Ghraib tortured for the lulz. Drones operated from the comfort of a container in Utah by fat sweaty men eating donuts and killing civilians in Pakistan. A sign on the door of the container that reads "You are now leaving the United States of America" for improved cognitive dissonance. When they killed Bin Laden without a trial they gave a glimpse of their ugly soul to the world. The uniformed murderer who killed the "terrorist" (that the CIA had created decades earlier) still brags on twitter for having shot Osama in the face and it's not even hate speech according to the platform. It's OK to call for the killing of a "bad person" as long as we all agree they belong to the outgroup. The various administrations that until today operate black sites around the world (including Europe) proof the West is no better then Al Qaeda, or Russia or China. We just have better propaganda. The difference between a Russian, a Chinese and an American? The Russian and the Chinese have no illusion that their government is up to horrible shit and can't be trusted.
The foreign policy of US and EU is one disaster after another. Today they could all cash in at the "good-vibe bank" by NOT opposing waiving of patent protections for Covid19 vaccine. Instead of a war on <imaginary_enemy>, a war on Covid? What they do instead: https://twitter.com/astroehlein/status/1389822242134110209
World is not ok OR ok OR neutral, word just is at same time morbid and beautiful, and only sure thing is we all going to die in some point in a future, for some unfortunate souls world was made an hell by others humans, events, or genetics.
> Counter-point; the world is mostly a neutral, even OK, place, with also violence in it.
and credits for this statement are real life experience or academic? Those who have actually seen the world would not make such an utterly ignorant statement. I much recommend volunteer work with refugees, a soup kitchen, working with disabled, etc to help alter this perspective. much recommend!
There are a few places in the world with little violence you are lucky to be in that place that you don't have to worry too much about your life everyday.
Compared to what? There are very few places in the world with the kind of violence that has been commonplace for most of world history. Yes, violent things happen everywhere, but most people in most places don't have to worry for their physical safety most of the time. That's a relatively new phenomenon.
The thing is that people living in these places that are unprecedentedly peaceful, in the way that HN likes to trot out whenever someone points out the ugliness of the world, may end up voting apathetically for leaders that have their war machine making the world far less peaceful in places that are out of sight and out of mind.
Sites like Liveleak may remind you that war isn't the choreography that your governments want you to think it is.
Oh, no, I'm 100% on board with you there. But in terms of total violence in real terms, even with imperialist violence of world powers, we're a smidge away from historic lows of global violence.
I've spent significant time in developing countries (outside the touristy parts), but the claim was based on statistics on world violence. Is it still bad in some places and worse in most places than we would like it to be? Sure. Is it near a historic low? Also yes.
LiveLeak is like those old drivers ed videos, it can make you better by showing how bad things can get.
I remember pre-internet it was Faces of Death [1] (lots faked but still intense), then Ogrish then the makers of Ogrish going to LiveLeak. There is some value in seeing the worst humans have to offer as it gives you a wider picture, but also too much of that is depressing. People should seek out the full spectrum to be based in reality, but also push better quality of life.
As a kid, horror movies were our superhero movies really with late 80s/90s slasher flicks. Fangoria was a big magazine. Then you see things like what actually goes on, seeing the true horrors of the world. Sometimes seeing those things can make you appreciate calm, quality of life focused ways, be nicer to people and try to make the world a better place as it can be raw.
LiveLeak was one of those places you could go to see the video that everyone else was blocking or censoring. ItemFix looks similar just not as intense, more on the WhatCouldGoWrong or IdiotsInCars type level. Always good to have another video site for seeing the broad spectrum of the human condition. Just balance time more towards quality of life, but always know how bad it could be, makes you respect today and appreciate things. Everything in moderation.
Even 30 years ago, police violence against black men was just another day. The difference is you're now aware of the truth. That's a good thing. We can't learn from our mistakes until we're aware of them & can confront them without writing them off as merely a shocking outlier.
I wouldn't conflate movies and real life. A snuff film is not the truth. Woody Harrelson is not a murderer, Derek Chauvin is.
I had a similar experience. I've lived a relatively privileged life, I've never been in a warzone. Being exposed to the brutality that exists outside of my comfort zone really opened my eyes to the fact that other people live very very differently. You can "know" that, but it's much harder to feel it without some experience - and while a picture is nothing like experiencing that sort of life, it's a hell of a lot more than just reading that it happens.
There's a visceral reaction when you see something so brutal and horrific, and an empathy as well with the victim, that I think is extremely hard to obtain via text, especially short text.
I'm not saying LiveLeak was perfect or good, I think that it likely also fetishized tragedy - but I will say that there is absolutely something missing in existing news organizations with regards to showing the brutal, hard to watch truth.
It's fascinating to see how the sausage is made. It gives the most important datapoint before you can preach your higher ideals.
It's different if you seen a war(even if it's a liveleak video), it keeps your feet on the ground when you have to decide to cast a pro/anti war vote or argue about it's merits.
That's what worries me about our sterilised internet: Things happen, but we are not allowed to peak under the cover to see what actually happen. Unless it’s something nice, it must be limited to the commentary of people who themselves may never seen how it is made or even worse, having their own agenda.
Sure, gore can brutalise people but if it's happening everyone deserves to see it.
Much more people used to claim that the Covid-19 is just the flu, until the footage of hospital corridors emerged.
The think that really drove that home for me is remembering how after long trips you'd have bugs splattered all over your windshield and front end. People even used to sell deflectors.
That doesn't happen anymore cause we've killed off most of the bugs...
I saw a couple/few videos on LL and it shocked me to the core. I never wanted to see that kind of thing again. But I also wish that everyone could witness it without becoming psychotic about it, to have a visual imprint of 'as bad as it gets', and hopefully do something about it or at least avoid perpetuating those actions.
But that would never happen. A whole lot of people will go to very desperate measures to avoid hard truth, to avoid even thinking about this kind of situation.
This reminded me of an initiative that the Swedish government had going for a number of years, where they distributed a very graphic (lots of pictures) and cold description of the Holocaust to middle school students. The whole point of it was (as far as I can tell) to establish a compass of what true evil looks like, to never let history repeat itself. The title of the book was literally "Tell Ye Your Children", and I remember being given it when I was ten or something. It was an interesting initiative. Highly controversial.
Oh! Good find. Wasn't quite as graphic as I recall, but I remember that photo of the dying, seemingly terrified child on the sidewalk very well. Glancing through it now I gotta say I'm quite impressed by it. Interesting that they note how the book was "initially intended for adults" in the foreword.
What does this say about people who cannot see this kind of footage without becoming traumatized? Is it right to just call them incapable of handling the truth?
I had seen some things in the past, on similar channels (4chan). The result was that when someone else had to drive me somewhere on a freeway I became so hopelessly anxious that I was constantly reminding them to drive slower, or just not drive me at all, because in my book a weekend trip to the supermarket wasn't worth dying over. I was incredibly immature. My belief is still that cars are the most dangerous things the average human will operate, even though they are necessary in some cases. But the auxillary thoughts surrounding that belief are clearly not healthy for me. I truly felt as if I had been changed for the worse.
A few months after that I was nearly involved in a horrific accident with a group of people I didn't know very well because they drove carelessly on a road that was iced over. That only served to solidify my feelings and anguish at the time over the fact that death could come at any time. But it wasn't only that. Whenever I got into a car with somebody, I started to seriously question whether or not I would be alive in half an hour. I seriously began to consider that our vehicle would be struck from the side by an SUV or tanker truck, killing us instantly, without the slightest shred of meaning or insight about life, from every possible angle, over and over again.
I do not enjoy feeling like this.
Since then I've given up any notion I've had of driving again. I stay away from sidewalks next to the road whenever possible. I allowed my knowledge about "the hard truth" and "reality" of dying at any moment to spread to my closest friends and my family, and that has permanently changed how some of those people perceive me for the worse. I understand that this is not a rational way to approach life. But I still don't trust myself to drive, given how I better understand how I might act in stressful situations, and given that in many diverse aspects of life I'm not much better mentality-wise than "those idiots in cars." Yes, I can make the excuse that it's better for the environment. But in reality I understand that I can only choose this way of life because I'm lucky enough to not have to drive, and I also understand that it is a product of my weakness in accepting that millions of people are capable driving safely for decades and never dying anyways.
I feel like the images have only caused me to catastrophize everything I touch.
In my opinion, watching these kinds of videos can bring us closer to the truth. People should have the freedom to choose to see them. But they are absolutely not for everyone. I have seen things which have refused to exit my memory ever since, and the exhaustion of having to put so much energy and trust into therapists that ultimately never work out means that they will probably stay there for a long time. For too many of the images, I cannot understand what purpose they have served in my life except to solidify my already preexisting notions that I could die at any moment (in the sense of thinking I could die exactly 47 minutes from writing this comment), and that the world can be a cruel, horrific place. Watching such videos in itself doesn't change that. It does not make the terrible people less terrible. It will never change the fact that people will be mutilated and die in horrendous accidents because of personal or systematic incompetence. It will probably not cause enough wide-scale change to prevent the next authoritarian regime from brutalizing the citizens of another country. Maybe the footage will spur on a new generation of activists, but personally, I was already afraid of too many things for them to make a positive impact in my life.
Given that I understand the state of my mind, I should never have let my willingness to see "the unfiltered truth" get the better of me.
I’m sorry to hear about your anxiety, it sounds terrible to have to process those feelings in such everyday situations. You shouldn’t feel bad about the way your mind has dealt with experiencing horrific videos, and how it has led to anxiety around death and risk assessment.
It’s not normal to witness or experience such events, especially when they are concentrated and amplified on a site like LiveLeaks. We simply haven’t evolved to predictably handle such an intense cross section through human suffering. Everyone will handle the emotions differently.
>the exhaustion of having to put so much energy and trust into therapists that ultimately never work out
Are you speaking hypothetically or have you attempted to talk about these feelings before with a mental health professional?
I'm not speaking hypothetically; I have spoken to many different therapists over the years. I attempted to seek out ones that would practice cognitive behavioral therapy, but because I guess I'm not good at finding them, I've had ones that tell me they'd rather do things their way. This is after having to switch from one to another and restart the relationship if it doesn't work out. I don't think I can recall any single person I've attempted to cooperate with ultimately producing a positive outcome yet. Seeing someone who is a stranger to you every few months with the expectation that you'll have to open up and explain the darkest aspects of yourself all over again is very draining after it's been repeated too many times.
I absolutely could be doing this wrong, but every time it doesn't work out I tend to lose faith. I wanted therapy to work out for myself, and the people around me are still telling me that I should keep trying to get into therapy, as if it's the last and only option left for me to improve my life, as if there is no other practical way of treating my issues. Given that nobody around me has professional knowledge of the techniques, and that my friends and family are generally not going to want to listen to everything that's on my mind, I'm inclined to believe them. I probably just haven't found the right person for me yet.
About all the people close to me say is "finding a good therapist is hard" and leave it at that. They're not wrong, but I'm trying to figure out how to work around this problem, and it's frustrating. I'm currently on a wait-list for several, and I will only potentially be able to see them for the first time after several months at minimum, perhaps because the pandemic has caused an overwhelming demand for mental health services.
I hear you on the frustration with finding a good therapist. I’ve heard it’s not abnormal to go through 5+ before you find one who you really like. By the way, a good strategy can be to set up initial consultations with multiple in near succession, so you don’t have to wait so long before you can evaluate the next person. If you land on someone you really like, cancel the other appts.
But like you say, COVID is also making the situation worse. For example, all psychotherapists affiliated with my PCP’s hospital are booked out 6+ months.
Therapy isn’t your only option, but it’s a great option if you find someone you enjoy working with. Like life changing great. You should also be upfront with them about what you’re looking for (sounds like you are). If they ignore you that’s a red flag. Your PCP might have a locator service as well, which can save you some hassle. If you know you want CBT, that should be a primary filter.
You can try to solve your issues on your own but it can take a lot more work. Eg you have to start by understanding what anxiety is, where it’s coming from (not the literal thoughts, but on a subconscious level), and work to confront your deeper underlying emotions. Meditation. Understanding yourself. Not impossible, but up hill, and not appropriate for all issues. You could be blind to a lot of issues that a third party can help you identify. Check out the book Self Analysis by Karen Horney (have not read, just seen as a recommendation).
Ignore the “gamer” label. There’s a ton of good general advice on there. It’s an MD psychotherapist talking to primarily gamers and internet people about a wide selection of mental health topics. And then some more lecture style content. Ex search for anxiety. There’s a lot of advice on relieving symptoms, and understanding the mechanisms involved. He mixes standard western style approaches like psychotherapy with eastern style understanding of mind/body, which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.
Try watching videos of old people with Alzheimer's, and try imagining what people will be doing when you are dead to gauge how much your life is worth, and if small risk of dying in a car accident not caused by yourself is acceptable. For me in similar situation answers were not important and acceptable. But if you find that your life is precious to you it still would be better to channel the natural fear of death to more productive venues like https://www.towardzerodeaths.org or much more importantly to donations to https://www.sens.org because we are very close to solving the problem of death for good https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY
>I have seen things which have refused to exit my memory ever since, and the exhaustion of having to put so much energy and trust into therapists that ultimately never work out means that they will probably stay there for a long time.
Look into treating yourself with mdma or psilocybin.
For me it was seeing close ups of the Chechnyan war. I couldn’t believe what people were doing to each other. It has made the anarchy of war something to be avoided at all costs. Clearly showing that there are no winners on the ground. Soldiers shooting 3 generations of a family unarmed, soldiers having their heads clumsily chopped off with an axe.
I’ve avoided all of the not safe for life type stuff since, but agree that these are important things to see. With all the wars since and the easy images found on western news at least I know what is happening outside of what they are willing to show.
As a kid, I always wanted to be a pilot in the British airforce. I'd grown up on games like F19 Stealth Fighter, and I thought it would be the coolest thing in the world to fly planes like that and drop bombs on the bad guys.
I think it was during the gulf war in 1991, when I a TV news piece, shot by a war journalist. He was filming from inside a helicopter, and there was a US gunner using a fixed gun (50-cal?), gunning down enemy forces, shooting them in the back as they ran away.
I was horrified - this was not what I thought war was. My silly ideals of valour and honour, were not real.
As I grew older I saw and came to learn of yet more horrors - US and British bombs dropped on schools and residential blocks. Children blown to pieces. The US and UK selling arms to anyone with the money. And going back further, the indiscriminate use of cluster bombs during the Vietnam war.
One of the worst aspects, was how the military often seemed to try to bury their mistakes. When they didn't, all we got was platitudes until they did it again. Perhaps the worst of all, was seeing how everyone else seemed to maintain the "them and us" stance - we were the good guys, and all those brown people were the bad guys. Very few cared one iota if a bomb was dropped on a school in the Middle East or Pakistan. I was disgusted by the apathy around me.
And so, my dream became a nightmare, and I, thankfully, took a different path. I largely have journalism and truth seekers to thank for that.
I see my kids going through this same pattern. They idealize war guns and violence, and it really pains me because I know it sets them up to minimize the realities of war and violence.
I remember the precursor to Liveleak, Ogrish, which was much more graphic than whatever Liveleak became in Liveleak's last final years.
It was back in 2004 or so when I had to reconstruct a somewhat censored link on their forum, which took me an FTP server directory with videos, that I waited to download, which showed me Al Queda celebratory videos of killing US soldiers.
That was a first for me, I'd never seen footage of US not winning, let alone a side that considered it a good thing. Really just broadened my horizon.
Was uncomfortable at first because I felt there might have been a reason with personal legal liability that the footage wasn't available in other places, but much more curious.
Anyway, such footage is much easier to come across now, with beheadings and such just occurring. Any Facebook feed assumes you want to see an extrajudicial killing involving a US police officer.
But at the time I was amazed such content exists. Not appalled. I can't really relate to people that say they can't watch that kind of stuff and will just take someone's word for it. I get appalled by things out of someone's control, such as a gas leak blowing off the side of an apartment building. But there's never anything real I have any feelings from watching.
> The world is a scary and violent place. ... A lot is said about desensitization as a result of seeing horrible things on the internet, but in my experience, only the opposite was true. Seeing violence online when I was in my late teens sensitized me and made the stories on the TV real.
I can understand this idea. I tend to agree that confronting the harshness of reality (death, suffering) is an important act, particularly in your formative years, so that those confrontations don't paralyze you as an adult. Traditionally this is also done, differently, but getting your kid a pet and ceremoniously allowing them to process the grief of that pet's inevitable death (however it may come).
But... I don't know. Are any of us better people for watching a US soldier get executed on our computer screens when we were 14? Does that content, in fact, give people a sense of hopelessness and dread? When a confrontation with death or violence becomes a common (everyday?) occurrence, what does THAT do to the psyche of a child? Certainly if you watch enough, the hyperreality of exuberant violence serves to disassociate the viewer from conscious engagement and does become a morbid form of entertainment and I personally believe (despite the "free speech" angle) it is dangerous to condition your mind to be entertained by suffering.
Death and violence were a daily occurrence in not-so-distant past. The current era is an aberration when viewed from this perspective (a welcome one - but an aberration still). We'd do well to remind ourselves that reality is not sterile and violence-free like the mass entertainment/information industry wants to present it. That doesn't mean you should watch such violent materials, but they do spark reflection and conversation.
This is why reddit's /r/watchpeopledie ban was such a loss. I didn't go to the subreddit often, but when I did, it was an intense reality check at how good I and others have it, and how much of the world still needs help. Also helped me to really appreciate OSHA at my workplace...
Yes. After the Vietnam war, real footage of violence left the public zeitgeist. Liveleak hosted videos that showed what life was really like when you listened to the guy who was trying to recruit you into the U.S. Army.
I agree in many cases, but remember that this is a double-edged sword. Being exposed to horrible things can also make people support unreasonable policies and seed hatred. This principle is why the family of victims aren't put on the jury.
While I think visibility of these horrific things is important, watching too many or dwelling on them just isn't healthy. It reminds me of this opinion article on watching police videos:
I remember American TV regularly showing things like Palestinian children blown to bits back in nineties, or atrocities of wars in Africa, and then it somehow just disappeared.
Showing these kind of things has always been against the ethical standards of journalism and exceptions to it used to be discussed intensively by editors - excluding the tabloid yellow press who make their living from this trash, of course. I guess some of the more recent American TV channels realized at some point, after they had gained fame for showing everything, that quotas are not everything and that relatives usually don't want the death of their beloved ones displayed all across the Internet without their consent.
Sites like Liveleaks are very hypocritical, they pretend to show videos for "freedom of speech" while instead their main purpose is simply to satisfy their viewers' voyeurism. Cheap thrills are the main reason for viewing this kind of material - and don't pretend to be someone better, you've looked up that kind of stuff yourself for precisely that reason just like I have. People who watch this material only want to satisfy their curiosity and get the thrills from it.
That's also why Truffault once said "There’s no such thing as an anti-war film." (There are exceptions, like "Taxi Driver", and perhaps also "Deer Hunter" and "Killing Fields", but these are rare.)
Excuse me, but showing "Palestinian children blown to bits" was probably the biggest contributor to global pressure on Israel which resulted in Oslo accords, Israeli military pullout from Lebanon, and Rwanda not burning to the ground completely.
Even if what you claim was true, emotional knee-jerk reactions have never helped in any conflict. You give the best example, the situation in Palestine has not improved and looks as dire as ever. Showing things like "Palestinian children blown to bits" will first and foremost escalate a conflict and instigate more violence.
I stand by what I said, people almost solely look up these videos to satisfy their personal morbidity and voyeurism. It's the same reason why there are always many bystanders around accidents who stare at the victims without doing anything.
On a side note, there is also a false dichotomy in your argument. I haven't said that the press should never show such pictures or videos, just pointed out that it generally violates ethical standards of the press and it has always been hotly debated when exceptions should be allowed. Sites like Liveleaks are nothing more than trash in comparison.
> Even if what you claim was true, emotional knee-jerk reactions have never helped in any conflict.
I think it did, it did massively. On other hand keeping people oblivious to dire facts "because people will be outraged" is how you get Belgiums happening. "This can't be happening here" people were saying, despite a very credible threat, news of which were deliberately silenced, and played down by Belgian government of the time for the same reason. And when they woke up to the sight of German tanks on the streets, it was too late to agitate anybody. Belgian mobilisation failed because no men went to barracks because of prior normalisation of the situation.
> Showing things like "Palestinian children blown to bits" will first and foremost escalate a conflict and instigate more violence.
It's often when you do escalate conflict, and bring it to its logical end, when people can't simply stand, and do nothing, you do get things done.
Ireland could've probably been English Gaza by now if Irish simply decided to lay down, endure repressions without inflicting pain upon British, and thus normalising the situation.
When you have to scream your lungs out, you need to scream your lungs out.
If you don't, this is how it gets to outrageous situations like women being raped in broad daylight without any men around doing anything about it, and to dead silence of passer-by's.
Before, I thought something like this can only be possible in societies of China, or Russia, but to my most visceral disgust, it does now happen in the West too.
You haven't explained why my view of the world should be decided by a bunch of rich corporate media guys. This filtering is exactly why newspapers and TV news are going away. The Internet can show you what actually happened not some filtered, preened, and positioned propaganda. It is not your responsibility to control other people's emotions and reactions to real life events.
Newspapers, TV and press agencies are going nowhere. Contrary you what you seem to believe, journalists are risking their lives daily to bring you the actual news and all the pictures you click on. So far, the Internet has not provided anything of value in that regard except copy & pasting info from the press and news agencies, most Internet sites do not employ any writers and correspondents who actually go abroad to get the news at all. "citizen journalists" have barely ever reported on anything of relevance, and even in the rare cases when they happened to be at the right place and time (some hurricans in the US, I guess) their "reporting" was by far more biased and way less informative than what you'd get from the news media.
You're completely deluded if you think opinion blogs and copy&paste news aggregation sites make you better informed. On the contrary, they are just a modern form of the "Chinese whispers" game.
If those are the standards of ethics then ethicists are just a bunch of pretentious tossers who should be disregarded on principle. It fits with the absolute shit that comes out of the mouth of any "AI Ethicist" who takes any spurious correlation as creating robo-Hitler and clearly have Hollywood as the basis of their credentials.
There is no "consent of awareness of events" and frankly that would be a nightmarishally exploitable situation. It is a rationalization of being afraid of retaliation usually from being sued.
How on earth would Liveleaks be hypocritical for saying it is for free speech even if voyeurism is the main purpose?
Upsetting as it may be to you it needs actual contradiction of itself to be hypocritical. Accusing it of being a cynical facade is the the closest casting in a bad light stance.
The whole fucking point of free speech is recognizing you don't get to decide how other people think! It can be both things at once.
Better person is a matter of interpretation and context - there is never a guarantee that /any/ action will make somebody "better" to any framework much less the fuzziness of defining better.
> The whole fucking point of free speech is recognizing you don't get to decide how other people think!
Just like other media, Liveleaks could pretty much make you think anything they want you to think. The fact that they are more radical in their editorial decision (but they did not show everything either) does not mean that they influence people less. On the contrary, the more emotionally upsetting the content, the easier is to influence other people's thinking.
But I bet you're one of those guys who think everyone else is influenced except for you.
- The horror of the Mexican Drug War. The unbelievable violence and cruelty, which is almost the exclusive responsibility of the United States' catastrophic War on Drugs.
- Car accidents. I'm always much more alert, as a driver and as a pedestrian.
Actually, add fires into that list. Terrifying stuff.
Dude seriously the stuff in Brazil is next level. Mexico I felt like they were stone cold but had some semblance of reason for doing stuff. Brazil was just primal.
I was in Brazil for a month, luckily before I watched a lot of those types of vids. Honestly it’s a dangerous place, right beneath the veneer. If you get off the path and into a hairy situation you might be done.
This also changed my perspective on Isis cutting heads off and filming it. The act of filiming it is just of medial relevance. Of actual relevance is the suffering caused to the victim. Having said that - our media tries to sell the idea of a clean war. Air strike -> Bad people dead. First of all if a bomb goes off more often than not also innocent civilians are hurt and killed. Further more - and that is my main point - if a rocket goes off somewhere not everybody is dead immediately. Instead people will get random parts of their body ripped off and will bleed miserably to death. It's arguably more painful to die that way compared to getting one's head cut off within twenty-three seconds.
We used to watch the stuff on Ogrish back in the day,when we were teenagers. I couldn't say it desensitized me but made me realise I can't do shit about it. When one side of the planet is launching rockets to space and the other throwing stones on people because they looked at someone, there's no fixing of this only slow, agonising passing of time,with the hopes that it will eventually improve as people will be less and less willing to do certain things.
It also made me realised,how we, people in the Western world,are insulated from many horrors of this world both directly and indirectly by the lack of coverage on them.
Don't forget that the rocket side of the world does, in fact, also tend to throw some of those rockets at other people.
That insulation you mention is heavily intentional. How many Americans would have continued to support the military actions in the Middle East if live videos of mangled bodies were being broadcast right into people's homes on a nightly basis? We in the West live in relative safety yet we refuse to recognize as a culture how much harm is done by our societies' actions to others' safety. We subconsciously know it's happening but we say "meh." It's the ultimate privilege -- yet we wonder why so many in the Middle East hate the west. "They just hate our freedoms!!" They hate that we reserve the right to a relatively safe life for ourselves.
"Don't forget that the rocket side of the world does, in fact, also tend to throw some of those rockets at other people."
Oh absolutely! Rockets vs stones was a simplified example and I do agree that the world is much more complex than that.
I'm in Europe,so some of the issues are slightly different than those on the other side of the pond but there's also plenty underneath the surface.
Just yesterday was reading how many thousands of people died because a few countries decided to switch off radios that were supposed to capture distress calls from the boats with refuges in the sea. That's the ultimate stick fingers in your ears and do la la la kind of thing. And the list goes on,while we can sit in our safe homes thinking it's all out there,too far from me to care too much.
Seeing dead children and people with their legs blown off made all the commentary on CNN and Fox seem so understated.
The US understood that the media's unprecedented access & real time accurate portrayal of the Vietnam war was one of the reasons Americans got disillusioned with the war. Your sensitized reaction to the real scenes of conflict are common. The US doesn't want to make this same mistake again.
I never had courage to watch any such videos. But read a few things about torture and such, just reading these things traumatized me and triggered years long depression and anxiety. I lost my faith in God and humans. I lost my desires to make the world better place. Now I just focus on my family and ensuring their safety.
I guess different people will react differently to such images, some may become desensitized, some will become more sensitive like you, or some will go in shock and depression like me.
When I was younger I drove way over the speed limit. Then I discovered places like Liveleak and saw videos of crashes, mangled wrecks and mutilated bodies.
Agree. I was never that cognizant of what ISIS/ISIL/Daesh were capable of until I saw videos on LiveLeak that made it all very real. You won’t find those anywhere else, but I dare say that the emotions those stir in the viewer create political clarities that are razor sharp, in a way you can’t get through overly academic and stoic news articles.
Getting your head cut off and die within few seconds isn't more cruel than getting half your face ripped off and a leg due to an airstrike and then bleeding to death over the course of several minutes. Isis was just more honest with their inhumanity.
There are videos of beheadings where it literally takes minutes for the head to be cut off. It's not a swift blow to the neck with a sword. I remember one where the executioner had to borrow a knife from someone in the crowd because his wasn't sharp enough.
I think you're being downvoted because you're point is really just whataboutism. It's perfectly valid to talk about the horrors committed without needing to point out that other groups do nasty things too.
Independent journalists seem more willing to show the brutal reality. I recently saw this video of an officer being sent into an ambush by a man Homeland Security knew was armed and dangerous:
Agree with this entirely. So much is never said or seen on commercial media. It’s easy it’s shrug off a censored report and carry on with your day.
However the comments section was nasty. There are a lot of really not very right people out there waiting to have their world view and prejudices legitimized. And that’s quite worrying.
The change most immediately apparent to myself is that I actually wear a helmet while riding my bicycle now after having seen peoples heads pop like melons from even small accidents notwithstanding being run over by trucks (think of an opened tube of tomato paste being slammed by a fist).
Yeah and these “it’s all good! We’re all humans!” people seriously need to watch it and then realize you need to back up proper diplomacy with force if needed.
I agree that ignoring and avoiding reality of this world is not good. However, sometimes I wonder how much I fucked up my mind by watching all the horrible stuff online during my teenage years.
I personally believe gore videos involving children need to be banned, just like child pornography is.
I also feel gore videos that involve non-consenting adults should be judged as "revenge porn."
I understand there should be some leeway for journalists reporting the news and shedding light on atrocites. I'm just not sure where that line should be.
I'll never forget the video I saw on liveleak of a 5 year old who's hand was driven over by a car for stealing in Iran with the whole village watching. That minute of video did more to shape my views than anything else.
I think that's false because even under Sharia driven tribes children under 14 are exempt of any punishment.
At least the most severe ones.
Just think about it: if every child had those punishments deserved to adult people, they would be extinct in years. Even the most phanatic Mullah is not that idiot.
True. Too many people protest police actions and recommend "shooting the legs" and such. That's just one example that is readily disproved with a few liveleak videos of police shootouts, yet takes paragraphs to describe in text.
These videos help people shape their own opinions instead of trusting authority.
I mean, I'd like to try, except he didn't actually give us any of those reasons.
Rest in peace, LiveLeak. You were a beacon of reality that shone through the propaganda, the bullshit, and the sugar-coating. Your demise means that people who want to see something like a shooting that's been removed from mainstream platforms will be forced to visit darker corners of the internet. Now if someone asks me "Hey where can I go see that thing that was taken off of Youtube" I don't have a ready answer that isn't an alt-right cesspool.
> Now if someone asks me "Hey where can I go see that thing that was taken off of Youtube" I don't have a ready answer that isn't an alt-right cesspool.
Does this mean that only the alt-right have access to uncensored information?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by human biodiversity.
As for the others on your list, non-alt-right people (cf. non-alt-right sites) might be more inclined to discuss (cf. host discussions about) these "facts" if their primary use wasn't to be woven into otherwise fictional narratives claiming to be coherent justifications of racism and homophobia.
> these "facts" if their primary use wasn't to be woven into otherwise fictional narratives claiming to be coherent justifications of racism and homophobia.
So, the same thing mainstream society has been doing for the last 6 years, just for different races and groups?
If they criticized things like Outreachy (which literally discriminates people based on race and gender [1]) with the same energy that they criticize the "alt-right" then I would believe them. Otherwise it's just hypocrisy.
Those are alt-right facts is just a defense mechanism for people to avoid confronting the contradictions in their own belief system. None of this is driven by reason, at least not the logic of the truth of the matters allegedly being examined. It's all about the logic of identity and social status. It is high status to believe in magical equality. It is low status to acknowledge human biodiversity. The idea of settling important questions through mass society, mass media, mass democracy is more laughable every day.
Nah. There was quite recently a very interesting article about personality differences across sex on this very website.
But being suuper interested in "human biodiversity" without going through the upfront pain of explaining to the reader that you aren't trying to rehash a lot of old racist garbage is, well, a huge red flag.
Also, there are actual HBD blogs and communities and they're frankly pretty uninterested in the african-american vs european-american thing and far more interested in the movements and traits of all sorts of obscure people groups I've never heard of. While also being interested in things your typical white supremicist wouldn't think about like differences between Scottish and South-Western English peoples.
I think your value judgements show through the things you listed and your assertion of all those things being 100% true. The lethal dose comment has already had solid rebuttal arguments disproving the statement. That mixed in with your comment about him saying “I can’t breathe” also seems to imply more ambiguity of fault at his death and ignored the fact Floyd also stated he was claustrophobic right before that. I’m just commenting this to hopefully inform you that you may not be as impartial as you originally thought
The claustrophobic was a fake excuse considering he was sitting in a car right before, officers offered to roll down the windows to make him comfortable, he had used the same swallowing drugs and resisting arrest 1 year prior, and a man who is capable of breaking into a pregnant woman’s house with his 5 friends and beating her up with his gun in front of her son and then pushing the gun into her pregnant belly simply can’t believed to be claustrophobic. Nor can a man who worked security as their job be claustrophobic.
The George Floyd one at leat I've seen discussed outside places that could be termed alt-right.
There are also plenty of things that can't be discussed in alt-right places, only in proper free-speech places (which are rare and often heavily contaminated with alt-right due to them being kicked out of everywhere else). E.g. if you wanted to discuss whether "consensual child molestation" is actually harmful you'd get banned from any right-wing space.
The issue with all these things is that on right-wing forums these issues are spun from human biodiversity to white nationalism, racial crime statistics to racist rhetoric, concern about pedophilia into homophobia, an obvious lie into support of disproportionately tough policing relative to crimes committed, and, again, racism supportive of police. What is true for alt-right forums that isn't true for others is that hate speech tends to be protected on these private platforms.
If you read some alt right content (like 4chan /pol/), you might agree that some opinions deserve to be censored.
Hate and stupidity breed more hate and stupidity. If we approach this situation from a generic perspective we can defend free speech and argue against censorship; but if we talk about speech such as antisemitism, homophobia or black people hate, we cannot defend it anymore.
Somehow we achieved major accomplishments like civil rights act and gay marriage and defeating the bad guys when free speech was at its peak few decades ago. So I would disagree with your comment. Only way to defeat extremism is by absolute freedom speech. Else you are throwing it under the rug.
they are having some information remove from other places but are also having many misleading thing circulating, example being "election steal" in year past. like with regular media, alt-right and alt-left are having some thing you cannot find outside of them so reading a little is good (not fun but still good).
Just a nitpick; there is no alt-left: leftism has deep historical roots in the French Revolution that predate liberalism (which is by definition a centrist ideology). The left is the left, the right wing just calls centrist liberals leftist.
Just to nitpick some more. Alt-Right is a new term, a neologism. In current research it’s seen as a conflated term. This is due to it not actually being an “alternative ideology” since it matches to already existing ideologies. It’s a set of ideologies that are under Far-Right politics on the Left-Right political spectrum. [1]
While there is literally not an “Alt-Left” there are 100% Far-Left ideologies that a a hypothetical “Alt-Left” movement would most likely match to. The Left is the entire spectrum of the left, which is many things. [2]
Liberalism as a whole is not Centrism, . Social liberalism fits in Centrism which is a subset of liberalism.
Mind you also the Left-Right political spectrum does not equal the American Left and Right. It is a long history of observation including Alain’s reflections on the French Revolution and the study of international relations today. Hypothetically, the American Left could very well be on the Right and the Australian Left could be on the Left.
[1]: A mix of references from Timothy Snyder, and his book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” and George Hawley’s “Right-wing Critics of American Conservatism”
The “alt-left” label is a bit eye roll inducing to me because it seems completely synthesized as some tit-for-tat term for political argument and slurring. Whereas alt-right originated from reactionaries as a more of a self descriptive term (for some reason I thought it was Steve Bannon who first coined it but Wikipedia says it originated with Richard Spencer). Admittedly though it got appropriated as another boring catch-all slur.
The American left is absolutely centrist at best. The real “left” legitimately believes in socialism / communism at some scale. If actual socialism isn’t part of your policy position, I struggle to say you’re on the left.
> Now if someone asks me "Hey where can I go see that thing that was taken off of Youtube" I don't have a ready answer that isn't an alt-right cesspool.
You complain about some sites being alt-right cesspools, as if being a cesspool is not bad on its own.
Of course "cesspool" is bad, "alt-right cesspool" is the same amount of badness.
The reason you don't see a lot of "alt-left cesspool"s is because usually those people don't need to hide on alternative social media, as the mainstream ones are fine with alt-left people. Alt-right are the ones who are currently being fired if their opinion are being shared publicly.
Now I'm neither of those, and have no fists in the fight at all, but I also realize what the current climate is like, even though I'm hoping no one wins and eventually we can all be friends again.
Let be clear here though - usually the "alt-right" viewpoints that people are (supposedly) fired for are... violent, or call for discrimination or other things like that.
There's no huge threat of people being fired for wanting less regulation on companies.
Seems we're already getting a bit heated, as neither you nor I mentioned something about "wholesomeness" but here we are.
My point is not that alt-right opinions are wholesome, but rather that since they don't have a lot of places they can write their opinions without getting overrun by opposition, it's only natural they'll retract into properties where they can freely talk.
For example: If you're of the opinion that you don't think homosexuality should be legal, there is not a lot of places you could have a factual conversation about that with others, without it ending up in name-calling or huge troll wars.
Now I don't agree with that opinion at all (I'm bixsexual myself), but I do agree with the right for those people to hold that opinion and being able to talk with others about this opinion, without it ending up in huge fights and drama.
Guess I'm just so far in the "We can educate everyone" camp that the alternatives all seem so fucked up. Hiding people away in separate social medias just make things worse, and all this because people can't ignore others, they _have_ to say something.
Just as a quick reminder before people continue the discussion, from the guidelines:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Saying homosexuality shouldn’t be legal isn’t an opinion, it’s bigotry. Viewpoints that infringe on a persons rights are not opinions, it’s discrimination. I agree people should be able to speak freely but I also believe in standards. To take another example, if somebody has the “opinion” that women shouldn’t be able to refuse their husbands sexual advances, is this discussion that is acceptable or is it bigotry? Should people be able to openly discuss their “opinion” that adults should be able to have sex with minors? What if their opinion is that they should be allowed to kill homosexuals? There is a line. Idealism only goes so far.
Russia even created new 'anti gay propaganda' laws recently, after allowing gay relations in 1993, so it's not even a 'it takes time to reach this stage' cultural milestone.
But even though I think we can both agree that LGBT rights are a good thing, you have to remember that all the advances that we saw on this front is precisely because LGBT people crossed 'the line' of acceptability of their time.
And they had to fight people that had the exact same kind of reaction against free speech.
"Saying homosexuality should be legal isn’t an opinion, it’s heresy."
Understanding the futility of policing bad ideas or "wrong" ideas is capableweb's point. Whether or not society deems the idea as wrong or immoral reprehensible ect. the utterance of the words being judged as tantamount to the immoral act itself has shown to not be very helpful.
This shift has ever expanded the militarized zone of topics one can't even discuss and all for what purpose? It seems like the enclaves of bad and dangerous ideas now insulated from the very influence of better information. It this not just the worst of both worlds?
Opinions based on bigotry or reducing rights or "legalness" of a person based off of who they love, what skin color they have, what gender they have are all invalid opinions. I should not have to debate a bigot and act like their views are worth debating.
Opinions cannot be "invalid", just like a persons taste cannot be invalid.
You don't have to debate, just don't engage and problem solved. Others are interested in discussions even around subjects they don't agree on, let us continue being able to use the internet for those discussions.
Explain to me how thinking someone is lesser based off of who they love, what skin color they have, what gender they were born with or identify as is a valid opinion. Treating human beings as lesser for being themselves is an invalid opinion and not something worth debating the merits of.
You seem to be thinking that tolerating bigotry is acceptable because the bigot who wants to infringe on other human beings basic rights is a valid opinion. It is not. Please read on the paradox of tolerance, because tolerating intolerance breeds intolerance and allows intolerance to take over from the tolerant.
Bigots do not deserve fair debate. Any opinion that is based off of infringing on others rights based off sex, gender, or skin color is invalid.
> Explain to me how thinking someone is lesser based off of who they love, what skin color they have, what gender they were born with or identify as is a valid opinion
"noun: opinion; a view or judgement formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge."
Even if I disagree with the statement "The earth is flat", I cannot lie and say it's not an opinion, no matter how much I disagree with it. By invalidating peoples opinion by flat out saying "Your opinion is invalid", you miss any chance of having an honest conversation with them, maybe with a small chance of helping them understand a perspective they haven't considered before.
> Bigots do not deserve fair debate. Any opinion that is based off of infringing on others rights based off sex, gender, or skin color is invalid.
Let's say our conversation here was 40 years ago. Then with your mindset, "homosexuality should be illegal" would be what you would argue for, since that was the normally accepted opinion at the time. If I was to try to raise that conversation with you, you would have responded with "that's not a valid opinion, because I disagree so much with you". I'm saying, no matter how outlandish someones opinion sounds on the surface, it's always worth talking about, as otherwise we will never have any change in a good direction.
I urge you to look at the paradox of tolerance. Tolerating intolerance breeds intolerance. If I am intolerant of intolerant people then that is good. Bigots do not deserve to be tolerated, do not deserve to have their opinion debated, do not deserve to be taken seriously and do deserve backlash for being a bigot.
Calling people bigots without firstly discussing the view point makes you bigoted as it makes it seem like everything is black and white without any greys.
A lot of right leaning libertarians like Larry Elder for example believe that the federal government shouldn’t legalize gay marriage because the federal government should get out of societal issues all together- not just gay marriage, even straight marriage and other societal issues like abortion, what bulbs to use etc. Societal issues should be dealt at the local county/city/state level, not federal level as he founders intended it to be. This is also why right leaning libertarians oppose weed being illegal. Federal government should get out of that business all together.
So when Larry says he’s against legalizing gay marriage, those who don’t understand nuance ignore the rest of his comment and call him a bigot.
I can quote several other examples and many anecdotal ones too but I think this example is good enough.
> I do agree with the right for those people to hold that opinion and being able to talk with others about this opinion, without it ending up in huge fights and drama.
When one has the "opinion" that a group of people should be locked up for simply being who they are, then yes you should expect some backlash for that.
You say that but I have been called racist, and other *ist's for my basic libertarian views
Also there are huge sections of the population (some even on this very forum) that believe calls for deregulation, less government spending, reduction in social programs, etc are "violence"
Also people seem to bend over backwards to excuse the real and actual violence that occurs and is supported in authoritarian left circles, pushing the narrative as you have that violence only occurs on the right
I'm of the opinion that ignorance and closed-mindedness is the problem, not what ignorant and closed-minded people come up with. Can't fight fire with fire. That's why I don't think that we should identify them with their ideas. For the purposes of society, their discussions on that site are (supposedly) destructive. That's all the information we need to have a wholesome debate.
To withdraw to identifying people with their world-views is to give up on having a meaningful relationship. We do it because we can't tolerate them. The conclusion of that train of reactions is violence.
It is nice to see this sentiment I hope to continue to see more of it not only in words but action as well.
I've been taking a stand in my own life with friends about having hard conversations and not just drinking the coolaid of every inflammatory headline.
Its been very difficult to discussing with some friends that their views are far more radical than they realize.
Some time these conversations can be agonizing because ultimately you may not care "what side is correct" just that there is an honest discussion about the facts of the matter and even going into the facts of the matter can cause repulsive reactions.
Its strange the world we live in, in terms of discussions of ideas.
That aphorism has never really been true. If it's "fire" in the sense of projectile weapons, then of course you can. If it's "fire" in the sense of "forest fire," a controlled or prescribed burn is an oft-used technique to cut off a forest fire by creating an unburnable zone around it... The fire can't find fuel in an already-burned area, so it can no longer feed itself and dies out.
Can you fight hatred with hatred? Even if you end up killing those you hated, you'll still be worse off because the whole acting out against others was premised on others being responsible for the hatred you feel, which is false, the hatred is a projection of your own inner turmoil, so you'd still be hateful, and now you've sown the seed of hate yourself. Repeat until convinced. To use your example, it's like fighting fire by putting your hair on fire. It kind of helps, but only in a very perverted sense.
Yes, this is probably a bad idea, on the other hand the "paradox of tolerance" is a thing. (Note that it should still apply to actions rather than ideas.)
“Paradox of tolerance” is only a thing that someone once argued that it existed and people misrepresented it in that cartoon that is usually what anybody thinks they know about the original utterance. Like in this thread it’s also usually uttered as some sort of axiom rather than an idea up for debate.
I don't even know what cartoon you're talking about. I was referring to :
“The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”
― Karl Raimund Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
----
But anyway, IMHO it's not for websites to police free speech, that's what the judiciary is for.
I'm not sure whether I consider the new EU terrorist content regulation to be good or bad, it's going to depend on what "competent authority" giving the removal orders means.
The "specific measures to protect [...] against dissemination to the public of terrorist content" just seem like usual moderation tools, but again, it's left to be seen what is going to happen in practice.
That would imply that the world consists only of alt-left and and-right people. In reality the vast majority of people are pretty moderate, and there are far more than two political directions.
Most dramas on Twitter or Reddit involve some one- or two-digit number of people that get enormous publicity.
I don't think my comment would imply what you describe. I think it would imply at least (but not exclusively) the existence of 4 diffuse groups (Left, alt-left/moderate/centre-leaning-left, alt-right, right), just that Twitter and Reddit are cesspools where the loudest of the Left yell at each other for no other reason than nobody else will listen, because they've all been forced off or quit of their own accord.
But actually liveleak did become an alt-right cesspool.
Back before they made comments hidden to non-members, it was WALL-TO_WALL <insert-your-favorite-right-wing-kook-faction> a-holes mixed in with classic misogynists, anti-semites, racists, conspiracy theorists, and unclassifiable awful nihilistic basement-dwellers.
While I would have liked to think that the operators simply listened to their conscious, I am sure making the comments non-public was done strictly because they feared having a nut perform a mass-killing as a "liveleak exclusive".
LiveLeak was the only video site that still felt like the wild west. If I was ever linked to a LiveLink url I knew something crazy was about to happen.
I'm sure serving this kind of content had its hurdles legally. And running a video site cannot be cheap in the first place. LiveLeak will be missed.
It's not quite a pickup truck. It's more an elongated car with the rear passenger area traded for a tray to carry things around in. Though having said that, the terms are often confused.
While the Youtube purges did follow some obvious political lines, most of them were nuts. The only reason you go to Bitchute is that Youtube gave you the boot so that's their niche right now. I think these companies are trying to position themselves to be in a good place if these platforms ever trigger a more mainstream exit. But the fringe content makes them highly unpalatable so good luck. This is why I won't sink a penny into these sites right now despite my issues with Youtube, Facebook ect.
This may provide Bitchute with some diversity of content. I think this counts as a fringe community just not one that's all American right wingers. It remains to be seen if these communities are compatible (one group calling the other one "sand ****ers" in the comments might be an issue since Bitchute doesn't censor anything).
Having never heard of bitchute, I just checked it out. It’s basically just right wing nut job stuff. I think LiveLeak at least was a little more “balanced”, in that it was about entertaining content, regardless of the political ideology.
I just loaded the front page of Odysee. Here is a summary of the top videos it shows me: explanation of a helicopter accident, SpaceX SN15, corgis, green house design, guinea pigs, GPU review, Democratic Socialist, and a Godzilla vs Kong comic.
Okay? And when I loaded it just now, I see "Should I get married", Steven Crowler shenanigans, some self-defense videos, etc. I haven't been there just once.
If they're not stopping you from uploading and they don't hide videos from you (à la Youtube) then the content mainly being "right wing nut job stuff" is surely just a failure of non-right wing nut jobs to take advantage of such nowadys uncommon largesse.
Why is there so much fetishization of violent content in the comments? Sure maybe liveleak provided some footage you couldn't get on youtube and that is indeed a loss, but to think that the violence you see represents the truth is just as bad as denying that any bad happens in the world.
The world is far larger than any one mind can handle. I wouldn't judge it from a few videos taken out of context. The world can be a great place and so can the internet, buts it's easy to get PTSD from it. Browse responsibly.
I'll just repeat my previous comment because I actually feel this is important: I've gotten absolutely zero enjoyment from the few that I've watched. They make me feel completely sick and scared for myself and my family and I think about how incomprehensibly horrible it must be to live through these events, either as someone who died or someone who watched or knew the person who died. However, I am much more careful with my daughter and prone to take precautions after having watch them. I think they provide value, I absolutely do not get the same effect from reading or learning about bad things that can happen to me, my brain just never really considered it a real option until I saw it happen. And yes, I probably have PTSD from them, but I am not a careful person naturally so I feel they have probably had a positive effect on me and made my family safer because of that.
While you probably won't hear free-speech advocates shouting nearly as loudly for this as for view-point-diversity (ahem)... there is some legitimate concern that this content is often legal.
And more than that... it was often news-worthy. The kind of stuff on that site included war crimes, murders, armed robbery, reckless disregard for the safety of others, accidents caused by poor city maintenance...
You may not like the videos, but the things that they captured will happen whether the videos exist or not. And while I wouldn't recommend that anyone make a habit of watching something on LiveLeak, it was still a resource that had educational possibilities.
Like you said: most of the world is a great place. And I think most people, upon seeing violent content like that, would become deeper advocates for peace and safety. It's hard to be a big tough guy who thinks he's rambo when you see how meaningless your life is against a bullet.
I think that viewpoint diversity is properly seen as the canary for newsworthy content like this. Not that I have much faith that most see it that way.
Watching a compilation of car accidents from dashcams and cctv made me treat my car and motorcycle like a 2 tonnes weapon not a transport method where I can text, chat and fight search results on youtube. Don't accelerate on roundabout or that guy on a sidewalk might lose his hips with legs. Nope, I don't want to see that video again, but you should.
Me, and others, see such change of perspective a good thing, no other medium can provide. Many people here don't see that a positive fetish, but a warning. I watched that video like 14 years ago, and images are still in my head.
> fetishization of violent content [...] few videos taken out of context
it's literally the opposite, it's not for the of violence, it's the unadulterated content: every other outlet either filter or worse, "narrates" hevaily cut snippets out of source material.
and we already live in a bubble as it is. having some amount of "ground truth" was certainly better than none.
and I said as one that steered clear from the site itself most of the time.
If you don't experience seeing an American contractor getting decapitated by ISIS, then you may never have the gut-punch visceral understanding of how certain parts of the world works. Aside from actually getting kidnapped by ISIS, you can't experience it and truly feel the emotions of that act. Until you see a grainy, badly-compressed mobile phone video of someone slicing through cartilage and bone and sinew, a body twitching, blood trickling out from under the knife, a bunch of guys screaming and hollering and celebrating the victory of a murder. The body, headless, lifeless, being picked up and tossed in a ditch.
Now, watching that video won't help you understand ISIS at all. It may even completely color your interpretation of why the events took place, or who was doing it, or why. Is it better to walk around ignorant to a visceral understanding of horrible things? Or to walk around with new biases, after having seen something horrible with no context? Even if the "truth" is lost somewhere in between, I would rather know a little than know nothing.
We live in a world of "Nightly News" and platforms full of rules and restrictions. "Truth" will always elude us there, as long as someone else is deciding for us what we are allowed to see. It's nice to have at least one place where you can remove the filter.
> it's easy to get PTSD from it. Browse responsibly
"Yeah, he's real cool when he's showing you those videos on LiveLeak, man. The bus full of children being blown up is really funny; that's a funny video." https://youtu.be/OQdHeNNWrj8?t=82
Sure you can. You can build up a tolerance, but most people are not mentally prepared to confront graphic violence.
It takes months of hard training for soldiers to be prepared for confronting death. How is a school teacher going to feel after watching a video of a school shooting? Probably not very safe all of a sudden, and that could have long lasting scars even if it wasn't something they personally experienced.
Edit: And while I agree, LiveLeak was a source of truth for news stories, it also was a fetishization for some people. I think in order to truly tackle the legacy of liveleak, we can't ignore that some people watch gore for the gore and not because they want to be more informed citizens. I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater, but we must confront that reality too.
"most people are not mentally prepared to confront graphic violence"
That's ludicrous. The apex predator on the planet that has violently gained control of the planet and killed trillions of other species including its own kind is not only mentally prepared to confront graphic violence, it is hardwired to conduct graphic violence on both a personal and global scale, things that were published on Liveleak. But don't be hard on yourself, most people make believe and live in a fairy tale world that props up the falsehood of who they really are. Shutting down sites like Liveleak is just another way to perpetuate the fairy tale and hide the ugly truth.
As an apex predator, we don't hunt other humans for food. I'm not sure why you think killing a human is the same as killing a chicken.
We are hardwired as social animals to not kill our same species. It's the exact opposite of what you suggest.
All research shows that humans don't like killing other people. That's what makes Serial Killers so interesting as a topic, because they don't have the instinct to not kill.
Losing your instinct to not kill takes a lot of conditioning.
The problem is that these clips of condensed malevolence has such a disproportionate effect on your outlook on life. I'm almost certain it has made me much more cynical and less trusting in general. In my day to day life in a safe western society, it's been an overwhelmingly bad and unnecessary sort of "hardening".
"What exactly is Itemfix?
Itemfix is a website that lets users post and edit ("fix") video - , image - and audio files ("items").
Any registered user can turn existing items into "fixes"."
"What is a fix?
A fix can be a video, image or audio file generated out of one or more items that exist in the ItemFix system. An example of a "fix" would be a video with added captions, a gif image generated out of a video item, or a meme created through one of our "fix templates".
Sounds like a mix between YouTube and TikTok/Instagram, as in, video hosting with democratized editing. Wouldn't be surprised if they went for an app after a while.
My opinion is that the reality-check video host we need, is getting replaced by the meme video host we want. More holes to dig our societal heads into and abstract ourselves from harsher realities.
Hosting LiveLeak must've been really tough, can't blame them for moving on to something easier and more financially attainable, but I hope someone will pick up a similar torch.
Four LiveLeak videos will always stay in my head. WARNING: even in text this stuff is horrifying. Stop reading if you don’t want to have nightmares.
1) an ISIS video where a 7 year old kid or so goes through a building where a bunch of hostages are tied up. He shoots them dead in succession. He looks like he’s about to cry throughout the whole video — but he doesn’t.
2) a completely covered up woman(?) in Iran is executed in public. They tie the rope around her neck and then lift her up . Her legs flail and kick a little, then a lot, then stop. The crowd is shouting.
3) a teenage girl in Guatemala is beaten by a crowd. When she’s lying on the floor someone pours a liquid over her and lights her on fire. She struggles a bit and it seems like the fire has gone out. The guy comes and pours more on her and sets her on fire again. She struggles a bit more slowly and it seems like the fire is out. Then she yells the most chilling thing I have ever heard. She screams “Echenme mas gasolina, culeros!” (Throw more gasoline on me, assholes!) I will never unhear a 16 year old girl begging for a mercy killing. The crowd obliged and pours a very large amount of the accelerant on her and she flails around while burning to death.
4) a woman is walking with her two kids near a maybe 6 foot high single brick thick wall in construction. One of her kids touches the wall and it collapses on his or her head. The mother digs out the bricks to get to her child but when she sees him she has a meltdown and is grabbing her hair and screaming.
Absolutely horrifying, yes. But I don’t think there’s any other way to learn about this facet of the world. I think the world has lost a valuable resource.
LiveLeak definitely had the ability to change you. There was a video from a dashcam where a couple is driving down a road, and a brick or rock falls off a truck driving the opposite way. It bounces on the road before slamming through the windshield and instantly killing the wife sitting in the passenger seat. Whenever I feel like a member of my family has gotten on my last nerve, pushed me to my limit, I think of the sounds that man made as he looked at his wife and my anger just melts away. LiveLeak may have scarred me but it taught me not to ever take the people I love for granted.
After seeing countless videos of car/trucks/lorries with unstable load, my dad has been very annoyed with me whenever I need to help him drive a trailer around with stuff.
He just throw shit onto it, an leave it. I lock that shut down, hard. I'm not gonna be that one person who accidently killed someone one the road, because I had something come loose.
Be careful with that stuff. There are only so many scars you can accumulate before it really affects you. Life will give you scars all by itself eventually, no need to seek them out.
This generation has experienced an unprecedented amount of isolation from danger and I think we are far closer to a state where we need to be more exposed to the lessons those dangers teach than we are to being over-exposed
I was behind a truck, driving by myself at age 16, along an on-ramp with my window down. An object fell off the truck, came through my window, ping-ponged around the cabin of the car instantaneously and landed on on the passenger side floor. I looked down and saw that it was a sharpened screw driver about 8" long.
This along with many other incidents just like it have me completely paranoid of the highway. If it isn't projectiles entering a vehicle at highway speeds it's pedestrians and cyclists getting run over at 20mph. Between safety concerns and health concerns (burning gasoline) I have about had it with automobiles.
Your first point, sad as it is, reminded me of this article I read, which gives clarity on how child soldiers are made in a way that I haven't read elsewhere, despite reading books on exactly that subject
Not related, but I'll just close by saying I didn't have the same respect that I now have for rotating shafts at industrial facilities until I saw some industrial accidents on the internet. Lo and behold years later, as a programmer, I'm working at a factory automating some things and there it is, an un-shrouded rotating shaft connected to a fairly large motor, right there at ankle level. Stink was raised, shroud was installed.
Some months back I saw footage of a lathe accident in a Russian factor (it was on Reddit but possibly the footage was linked from LiveLeak). Similar to you I have developed a much stronger respect for heavy machinery.
It's even made me more careful when I use obviously much smaller power tools at home. Tools like circular saws, mitre saws, and even angle grinders have the ability to irreversibly change your life (or worse) in the blink of an eye if not handled with care and respect.
Just thinking about that video again has made me feel slightly queasy, but there's no doubt seeing it has done me a huge favour.
> Circular saws, mitre saws are sold with protective elements where I live. To respect, but it won't jump out and hurt you.
That's true but they're not sufficient to protect against all injuries if you don't take proper precautions. And, as far as circular saws go, you're flat out wrong about them not jumping and hurting you: if they bind up in the wood that's exactly what can happen in the worst case. It's called kickback.
SmarterEveryDay prototyped an anti-kickback mechanism for circular saws[1] that I hoped would inspire some mfgs; it's crazy that we haven't seen more safety innovation in handheld power tools 10+ years after SawStop became widely viable.
For me, it was a Kurdish soldier on the ground getting shot in the head with a AK from point blank. There were no bits and fragments flying around, his skull just broke apart and his head flattened uncannily like a squished rubber toy and his eyes popped out.
In another video, a ISIS (?) soldier gets shot in the head, and falls to the ground. We see him struggling to get up while a viscous red liquid pours out the side of his head. Just pours out. No pink mist or giblets. He didn't die instantly.
This broke the preconceptions I had from movies and videogames. I consider it an important milestone.
I think they do it for lower age ratings. In video games, people just drop and stop moving, and often there's even no blood. No visible pain or struggle. I think it desensitizes people to violence.
In reality, after a large scale battle the field is littered with people writhing in agony. It commonly takes several hours for a wounded person to die. Several hours of pain, as you slowly realize no one is going to help you and you're not going to make it.
Those types of videos gave me a new fear. I've never been one to fear death, but now I fear being in severe agony where I question why I'm not dead and wish I was.
The worst I saw was one where they gouged a guy's eyes out, skinned his face, and cut off his hands and feet, and he was still alive and seemed conscious and aware.
Maturing and learning of the dangers around us. We can't wait for natural selection to teach us, it's good to have a rough idea of how non-telegraphed and rapid emergency situations are.
The ISIS slaughter house video is stuck in my mind. Lots of orange dressed and back-tied prisoners hanging on hooks. One is on the floor and they slowly cut/grind off his head with gurgling bloody noises. I read that everyone in that room is high of drugs. Prisoners and executioner.
But then, and this makes me want to shut the borders around EU and North America and a few Asian countries, you watch some gore videos from South America and you realize that ISIS has nothing on these drug cartels.
The drug cartels are truly completely fucked in the heads. And they slowly ruin country after country. It's just a question of time before we see strong presence of US/UN military and drug deregulation(whether you want it or not) to prevent a complete collapse of those societies and the whole of South America. Or maybe I've seen too many horrible gore videos?
Appreciate you and others detailing some of this stuff in this thread. I mostly have to stay aware from content like this; don't really have the psychology for it. But I'm glad it's documented.
For me it was the crackhead who climbed the telephone pole, got electrocuted by touching the wires, which caused him to fall off the pole, and then he then just stood up and walked off while on fire.
It made me both want to avoid crack and want to do crack.
clicked a few light links (no gore, no blood) and the more shocking part was the comments... they can't be real people, it has got to be a bot and/or honeypot of some kind.
I stopped visiting the site after viewing a video of cartel torture that was worse than anything I'd ever seen. I still see it in my head all the time. Although LL certainly helped meet the morbid curiosity a lot of us have, I am ultimately glad it's now harder to find this kind of content.
I think the very fact that reading those descriptions is confronting, if it is to you as it is to me, is evidence that you do need exposure to understand that horrible things happen in the world.
I understand it academically, but every time I see or read something like this I realise that I don't really understand it.
it's just sick entertainment covered by explanation "I need to see how horrible the world is", and being the audience you create demand for future shock content at expense of human lives. There're better ways to educate yourself and make the world a better place.
I completely disagree with you, I've gotten absolutely zero enjoyment from the few that I've watched. They make me feel completely sick and scared for myself and my family. I am much more careful with my daughter and prone to take precautions though, after having watch them. I think they provide value, I absolutely do not get the same effect from reading or learning about bad things that can happen to me, my brain just never really considered it a real option until I saw it happen.
After the photojournalist James Foley was beheaded by Isis, I read a thoughtful editorial arguing that we shouldn't watch it, in part because people were ultimately doing it not to become more informed, but to test their ability or willingness to stomach it. It also argued, that ultimately this was a form of entertainment.
To address the argument that we should "see how horrible the world is", I think it's worth asking why that's necessary? What will it change, beyond making it harder to sleep? Further, there's always something worse you can see, so should we go on trying to fund ever more horrible videos to watch? What is gained by watching something live that isn't gained simply by reading about it or reflecting on injustices without becoming voyeurs to people's horrors?
I think what's gained is a visceral appreciation for such events which prompts further action.
There's a reason why, when spruiking for donations, organisations like UNICEF like to show pictures of suffering children, and read first-hand accounts. These are the things that motivate people to act. We're not perfectly rational beings. We're all well aware that there are poor and starving people in the world, and mostly we do nothing about it. It's that emotional reaction that prompts us to act.
Reflecting on it instead might be sufficient, but if so then it's demonstrably not what people do, or else those pitches wouldn't be as successful as they are.
That action, to me, is the point, and it comes in many forms. Some active, like for instance donating to a cause. Some passive, like changing opinions on an ongoing war that your country is party to.
Sure, some people are watching it for entertainment value. Is that a big problem, if it changes opinions nevertheless? And from reading the other comments on this thread, I think it's apparent that it changes opinions.
I don’t think it’s entertainment any more than reading the news is entertainment. I know that LiveLeak for example changed my view on capital punishment. You can sit in a coffee shop and debate things but once you see a guy cut out another guy’s beating heart in front of his son (before doing the same to the son) you think, “they really ought to execute that guy.”
>being the audience you create demand for future shock content at expense of human lives.
What? Will we start more wars to provide it? Make workplaces, roads,etc less safe?
Chances are this type of content has saved more lives than anything by making people more sensitised to what can happen and aware of things like workplace safety.
There's something to be said about people seeing war and intervention as boring policy moves, not being able to stomach the thought of seeing where the meat they eat comes from for some reason and thinking about boring warning videos when thinking about workplace safety or a court case when thinking about drunk driving.
On the contrary, I don't find it entertaining at all. In fact I generally can't bring myself to watch LiveLeak videos, those text descriptions are my limit. But I do think my understanding of such situations is poorer for not doing so.
> you create demand for future shock content at expense of human lives
The way you phrase this makes it sound like you think people intentionally create these videos where people die just to post it to LiveLeak for people to be entertained by.
A lot of it was stuff that was going to happen anyway that happened to be caught on film.
> the videotaping wouldn’t happen without an audience.
Utter bullshit and you know it. It didn't have an audience until it was uploaded. By that point it was already recorded. People have always recorded events throughout history for as long as they were able to be recorded.
Was the Hindenburg disaster recorded in the hopes that something awful would happen so it could 'have an audience'?
LOL, this is some kind of Poe’s Law thing. Anyhoo the reason that these cartel tortures are filmed is to send to the family and associates of the victim and others who would think of working against the cartel. The purpose is to scare the fuck out of anyone trying to disrupt or compete with the cartel. The audience is the only reason it is filmed. Before phones they would just leave the flayed head in the town square or similar.
>create demand for future shock content at expense of human lives
Unfortunately those humans are going to die and be maimed anyway. If those videos are out there, there's a chance of educating people on the danger of not paying attention crossing the road, or using a lathe, or throwing a firework into a sewer, or any of the million other mundane things that people do that don't seem super dangerous on first thought but actually are?
With respect, a lot of people disagree with you... even a lot of people posting personal testimonials on this page. Seeing something can have a much more profound impact than simply being told about it.
Mixed feelings from me. I remember the Hussein video. I never believed in the vision, but they hosted important events I simply could not see from other sites.
Reddit users rely on it and I knew what I was getting into if I clicked on a LiveLeak link.
Separately, being a content moderator for LL must be absolute hell. While you must filter for illegal things, you're actually expected to watch through the death and gore. That can not be healthy.
I'm not aware of any studies, but there are several articles on the content moderators. Some effects mentioned were:
- people develop severe anxiety while still in training, and continue to struggle with trauma symptoms long after they leave
- conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views
- Fired employees regularly threatened to return to work and harm their old colleagues
- they coped with the stress of the job with sex, drugs, and offensive jokes, all in the workplace
- self-harm were also common
- turned people intensely paranoid
There's a lot of first hand accounts of people explaining the logic behind seeking and watching such content. The WatchPeopleDie subreddit had a lot of that and you had many people detailing their experience, but iirc it turned into a neo-nazi hangout before it got banned.
I do wonder/hope if there's a bio-technological way around it, with drugs or application of a magnetic field to the brain, that would interfere with memory making thus mitigating some or all of the effects.
Obviously, it would need to be safe to do. I still shudder inside at one video I saw (on Twitter that took forever to be taken down (>.<)) so I can't imagine what it's like to endure so many.
The fact they were HQ'd in London always confused me. Yes the EU gives you some protections, but taking a pseudonymous TPB-style approach is probably easier for everyone (support, operations, management, marketing) than the legal grey area LiveLeak operated in.
Also the end of the note from Hayden sticks with me, I know the type of videos or users he's referring to and I don't think the majority of readers will realise just how fucked up this platform was. Yes, there were videos from the likes of Lasse Gjertsen who made people question a lot of the content they saw, but there were some real ones in there too.
> Lastly, to those no longer with us. I still remember you.
I'm not sad it's gone. But there should probably be a place for all of this type of content, I'm just not sure where. The public internet probably isn't it.
Reading the ToS for the new site.. It seems all the content that made LiveLeak so popular (murder, shock videos, terrorism, suicide, sexual violence) is the exact content they won't allow. Seems a little bit like management are wanting to settle down, they know the main brand isn't going to be profitable long-term - but they can at least monetize some of it by building a video hosting site from its userbase.
If it's not available to the public internet, what's the point? If you just make a "upload your video and we'll archive it" site, it probably won't gain any traction as people can't link to it and thus your site doesn't gain the mindshare that LiveLeak had. And I don't think people are going to start sending SD cards to a random PO box.
I would honestly hope it could be hosted and paid by an academia organisation, as the motives to drive profit behind this type of platform are so insidious - I fear we'll likely see darknet style actors step in (that is, if we haven't already - I try not to read too much about that side of the internet, having listened to some podcasts that explain just how bad it can get).
The new EU regulation makes hosting of such sites no longer possible. Probably that's why they closed. I think that many more sites like this will be closed.
To sieve through all the content and delete would be a painful task as well as it making the site look bare. Easier to rebrand and throw up content that wasn't NSFL.
> The fact they were HQ'd in London always confused me.
UK is quite different from the EU when it comes to law. Many businesses largely operate in a grey area and as long as there is no public outrage or they don't step on a wrong politician foot, they are good to go.
Even before anything happens you'll likely get plenty of warnings and time to sort whatever problem you have before anyone will be knocking at your door.
I feel decentralized storage and better tools are the key both for technical and social reasons. We should start looking at old data just like we look at old paintings, old parchment books and fossils - as things with inherent intangible value to be preserved for, and by, every generation.
Centralized archives are single points of failures subject to political and business pressures. Political ideologies and their governments love to hide or rewrite inconvenient histories. I feel centralized archives (like Wayback Machine or Google's initiative) can't be trusted or relied upon for long-lasting access.
Something that surprises me is that the tech community seems to feel the necessity for long-term archiving much more strongly than the history / sociology / humanities research communities. I expected university humanities departments would be at the core of such initiatives.
Libya 2011 and arab spring in general spawned a lot of violent videos that were important for documenting what happened. They must have been archived or stored somewhere too - I know they were on youtube at the time, quickly taken down, and some were trying to archive/stow them.
Same as in other industries, use something else to cover the costs, best if there is incentive to keep that service alive. For instance, a porn site like xvideos could take over the hosting and moderation.
Seeing a child trying to gather the pieces of his mother after getting shredded by an Apache gunship undermines government propaganda. If something makes you realize you're probably not always the good guy bringing democracy then that something is quite dangerous and it should be removed.
> that something is quite dangerous and it should be removed
You really took a left turn at the end there and I’m not sure if you were serious. Poe’s law in full effect, I’d argue the opposite. If something true challenges your narrative the only intellectually honest thing to do is embrace it.
I'm merely explaining how it got to the current situation from my own point of view. There is no money in showing the real consequences of people's actions. People pay to be coddled and have their biases confirmed. Without any money you cannot maintain a considerable online presence (especially content hosting).
The internet is dying a slow death. Instead of being an open exchange of ideas and content, it's become just another vehicle for corporations to make a buck off of everyone. It's now locked down, dumbed down and buttoned down and is controlled and surveilled to make sure no one steps out of line or has their feelings hurt. It treats everyone like fools and children who can't handle reality, a new idea or an opposing thought. Don't talk about this. Don't look at that. Don't think independently. Control. Group think. Manufactured consent. The goal is to have you fall in line with the dominant paradigm that is ultimately driven by economics that make a small percentage of the world's population very rich and solidified in their position. Like all great things that had so much potential but ultimately got harnessed and driven to the lowest common denominator for control and power, it was fun while it lasted.
With so many (mainstream) eyes on the public web these days this was bound to happen.
The wild west of the (pre) 200x's may be coming to an end but stuff will prevail in darknet and private archives or outside western jurisdictions, and continue to spread from there. (It's easy to forget the non-English internet exists too!)
Powerful (gov + big tech) forces push this way for some time now; OTOH I believe the internet remains a difficult beast to tame as long as control doesn't reach China levels.
Also, archive shit, because the internet does forget.
Free flow of thought is dangerous to ruling parties (and fake opposition), because people get to know what's going on more easily. The current push is to leave only a few global players that will share personal data with intelligence services.
For example, the new EU regulation essentially stops anyone worldwide from running any website with user generated content, unless you have money to set up a legal entity in the EU that will respond to censorship requests within 1hr SLA round the clock.
Similar to bestgore.com - I suppose as the Internet becomes more and more just Google-land, niche websites such as these two will continue to disappear.
You consider Reddit usable? I stopped using Reddit a few years ago, recently came back and tried both the website and (dark-pattern driven) mobile app. It's distinctly worse. Everything seems to have been re-engineered to drive "engagement" and/or mindless consumption.
I've no idea who approved that pos. It actually makes it harder to discuss anything on what's supposed to be online forums. That translates to lost revenue, imo. Even Imgur comments are easier.
My latest gripe is that they're breaking the "back" button for no useful reason.
The "Anti Evil Ops" team are also full of braindead morons who do not distinguish between context and targeted harassment.
In a private sub (A PRIVATE SUB, FOR FUCK'S SAKE!), I quoted what a cop said to me when I went to report an assault and I got permanently suspended. (Cop said I was "probably being a [bundle of sticks].") The suspension reason? "Hateful speech."
Someone randomly posted a single word post ("N-hard-r!") in response to someone in a public sub. The post was still there one month later despite being reported by multiple people. Based on the user's posting activity, was not suspended for the slur, either.
There are people in trans subs who have been given suspensions for openly talking about the kind of harassment they've received and the things that have been said to them. Some of it instantaneous based on keywords. Some of the people I know who have appealed have had their appeals denied.
But apparently someone using a racial slur in a post all by itself with absolutely zero context for it is somehow acceptable in comparison.
Reddit had gone down some really questionable paths before, arguably tacitly allowing criminal behaviour on the site until it was noticed by the media... and then they draw the line at queer or trans people talking about their own experiences.
At this point I can only say "Everything." if someone were to ask me what is wrong with Reddit... and this is coming from someone who had a 14 year account on that site.
on reddit you can say something factual yet outside party line and can get downvoted to oblivion or get deleted on some subreddits but your post might survive on some other subreddit.
hn is just a big subreddit with one party line. we get bombarded by party propaganda. almost everything is anti-others. seeing through propaganda, stating the obvious or pointing the elephant in the room is autamatically and conveniently 'whataboutism'. and that is if you are lucky! you probably get deleted or worse shadowbanned. what a disgusting practice. what you are left with is posts written by seemingly brillant bigots and jingoists.
I wouldn't go that far, but it's certainly not a free speech platform. That does have its advantages, though. 4chan, for example, takes a toll on my mind -- even when I'm careful about which parts I visit.
Use old.reddit.com instead of regular reddit.com, RES works just as well with that and you can get various addons to automatically redirect you to old.reddit.com if you happen to click on a reddit.com link in the wild.
On mobile, avoid the "official" app entirely - it's very pretty but is very very clearly focused on showing you as many ads as possible. Apollo is my pick for iOS and Relay is fairly comparable on Android.
Yeah, and so does millions of people. My account is over a decade old and I considered the "new reddit" unusable for all of 3 days, once you get used to how the modals work it's better, IMO. Not to mention the responsive layout which was atrocious on old reddit when I switched.
As for the app maybe the user acquisition techniques are annoying, but well inside the app I really have zero problem with it. And I used to be a diehard Alien Blue user, which is the gold standard.
Unfortunately it doesn't filter out the mindless consumption. A curated front page can help, but even that has become less and less effective in my experience.
The only thing Reddit is killing right now is Reddit itself, with their odd UX redesign decisions.
Also, Reddit went from being a place with a lot of room for freedom of speech to a place that disallow a lot of discussions on different opinions and wedge issues. Even Twitter is now more open to diversity of opinions.
No, the 1-2 punch of Reddit and Discord have all but decimated the old vBulletin forum days. If you have a niche interest, Reddit and Discord are pretty much the only place to find a community for it. It's very dominant in that space now.
I'm pretty much forced to use Reddit or else disconnect from communities I'm interested in.
Word of mouth, on Reddit (sidebars or sticky posts), and ocassionally just googling "X Discord". Some very niche things, like character mains in video games, usually will only have a discord to my frustration.
> No, the 1-2 punch of Reddit and Discord have all but decimated the old vBulletin forum days. If you have a niche interest, Reddit and Discord are pretty much the only place to find a community for it. It's very dominant in that space now.
You missed the point. Reddit redesign is ensuring everybody flocks back to a more readable form of social media that does not look like reddit redesign.
I was reading yesterday about how "Old Reddit" is often used by a tiny proportion of users (~5%) and the vast majority of users are using a mobile app to access it.
This varies by subreddit, of course, but anything with mainstream appeal is likely to have most users on mobile web or an app.
I wonder which percentage of the most active users are among those who choose to do that (versus the casual users who only spend less than five minutes on the website).
I’m still surprised that Tor hidden services never filled that gap.
As more and more stuff disappears from the clear web, I assumed more people would realize that .onion sites don’t have to be a wasteland of largely spooky scams.
But if anything the quality of hidden services seems to have declined in recent years. I’m guessing it’s a mix of darknet FUD combined with less and less people knowing how to host a website without using an easy to deploy service
> less people knowing how to host a website without using an easy to deploy service
Also less people just caring about anything that isn't the normal open web. Have to install something? Nope, no way. Unless some very dramatic and visible changes take place in our society (or big companies with too much power step in and make the choice for the average user), darknets are doomed to be a tiny tiny niche.
Right now tor stats says there are between 2M and 2.5M users.. and if you discount everyone who's just using it to hide their IP / piracy / working around geo blocks, the potential audience for content hosted as a hidden service is absolutely tiny.
I also think that if tor or any such system got really big among normies, governments would start cracking down. Right now it's probably just a convenient tool for hosting honey pots and keeping an eye on the few people that use it.
Every once in a while I think about hosting a blog or a forum on tor but then I get the vibe that I'd have about as many readers as I would if I just wrote my thoughts on toilet paper before flushing.
I'm absolutely convinced that Tor was compromised around late 2012 or early 2013. It used to be the wild west on steroids. You could find deviant material everywhere and had to do no digging. Then the dominoes started falling around the time of the Silk Road shutdown. Hosting companies, hidden wiki's linking to twisted stuff, video sites, bomb-making sites, drug sites all shut down in swift succession.
My experience convinced me that any network that advertises itself as anonymous and is actually anonymous will swiftly be filled with deviant material. That will be my litmus test for anonymous networks going forward.
That's definitely not true. Most hidden service use some darknet-specific captchas nowadays. Just open the next best darknet market or simply forum and you'll see what I mean.
I use tor for some of my normal clearnet browsing and static hosting .mp4's works decently over tor. Basically anything not bloated/modern works great.
The Internet just got less weird and more and more it feels like the days of it being "sketchy" to the average user are mostly over. On the other hand, social media can be insidious and in some ways it's made society weird as ever in a worse direction. Then again there's a lot less creeps, criminals, and deranged or at least their presence isn't as strong or obvious on here. I guess that is about as I feel about this, and I think it's been a couple of years since I've watched something there. I'll bet there will be an alternative for those who really seek this stuff out, though, adjacent to what remains of the pirates.
LiveLeak was the only place I know where I could find footage of warcrimes in Ukraine that will more than likely never be "a part of our national conversation".
Does the media tell you who Azov battalion or right-sector is?
That we have no problem funneling weapons and money to them?
Even if they did, would they show you the video of them crucifying and setting on fire a captured enemy? Liveleak did.
> Does the media tell you who Azov battalion or right-sector is?
Western media, yes? I mean, when they were relevant. Russian TV keeps mentioning them every other day, and short of how Ukraine has been the Third Reich all along.
Azov is integrated in the armed forces now and subject to a level of scrutiny that they were not back in 2014. Pravy sektor has no representation in other than some local councils, which is real good if you compare it with the numbers of Vox in Spain, Front National in France, or the usual suspects.
2014 caught Ukraine off guard and they threw everything they could to the East, and unfortunately that included extreme right paramilitary groups that had no rules of engangement or official oversight of any kind. The government(s) corrected it in the best way they could, which wasn't great to be honest. Not defending it, just contextualizing it.
I wonder if all the atrocities committed during the Syrian Civil War still sit somewhere on the open internet, relatively easy to search. I know that at some point LiveLeak was one of the few remaining websites that was still hosting that kind of content, which I personally regard as very important to preserve.
Anyone remember rotten.com? It was a treasure trove for morbid curiosity. You can probably still visit some of the pages on the wayback machine if you're curious.
Whenever something big happened in the news and I wanted to see the video or images directly, uncensored, real as they are, LiveLeak was The Place To Go.
It certainly was at one point, but near the end it definitely wasn't. Whether it was soft censorship, hard censorship, or a declining user base, I struggled to find videos I could sometimes even find on Twitter or Youtube. Videos whose place was obviously LiveLeak, based on their standards from 5 years ago.
As much as I lament the death of LiveLeak, it died well before today.
- as a child I could be heartless towards animals. Wasn't extreme but definitely didn't care and would "punish" when they didn't behave. Having to kill a sick rabbit to prevent it from suffering was what changed me. Maybe a video could has done as well, but this was way before LL existed.
- in farming school we had to watch a video of all the stuff that happens on farms complete with images and graphic explanations, stuff like: "here the neighbor came down in the evening to find out why the tractor and the baler was standing in the middle of the field, engine running in the night. He found the caps in front of the baler. We figure he tried to get some gras unstuck by kicking it and got his foot caught in the feeding belt."
Was any person or institution archiving liveleak videos? Even just for the sake of law enforcement or journalistic documentation, I hope there is a way of accessing this content. I'm sure there's a lot of unprocessed history in those shut down servers.
There is plenty of content they can't host and I'm sure tons of people were anxious to find examples they could use to take the site down with. Powerful governments aren't exactly too keen on the populous getting a real perspective of what war is like.
Also, bandwidth and power isn't cheap. They have to pay for it somehow.
If it is super easy then can you list what advertiser networks or affiliate networks they should use? Also it's not like somebody going to watch a Liveleak video has any commercial intent so the ad RPMs will be really low
kinda interesting, almost like they are trying to create meme videos. Currently, I don't think it's very good, but generally could become a thing I supposed.
It's definitely not suitable for the content it currently hosts, but would be a perfect name for a site containing service manuals and such. Even the logo is suggestive of that. My first thought upon seeing that domain was whether it could be related to https://www.ifixit.com/
Daily reminder that the future is decentralized. Also content like liveleak videos is a good mark that some platform is decentralized. If there's no content like this then it's centralized, controlled by somebody.
When something bad happened, especially during ISIS and the Jihad John period, or just an accident getting press - I used to rush over to LiveLeak whenever (I for some reason) wanted the real footage. A curiosity or guilty pleasure of some sort perhaps. I never understood why I did it, because quite often they just made me feel bad.
Regardless, in the later years they seems to not have incidents so I stopped going to LiveLeak. It felt like they stopped getting the real stuff, or they just didnt publish everything anymore and did some cencoring. So this is not a surprise to me.
Probably a minority here - but I could not stomach the horrible comments on LiveLeak, especially because it almost seemed like they were all written by a bunch of really young audience.
I dunno why I always thought for some reason LiveLeak is Russian only today discovering it's British?
It's shame what's happening, first they take down WatchPeopleDie (honestly Rotten and Ogrish were way long time ago), now LiveLeak, it's shame you are not allowed to see uncensored content anymore, I used to be regular visitor of WPD also for discussions, one could learn lot of useful stuff what to do in dangerous situations or how to avoid them.
This is a big loss and it comes at a time where it will soon be more needed than ever.
The last years has been brutal to "free information". Ever since Trump became president it seems a lot of people has begged the tech giants to filter and censor. And now they do.
I remember early 2020 when rumors about a new virus in China came out. There were very little news about it. But on YouTube and Twitter you could find scary videos of Chinese police/military in hazmat suits welding shut doors to big apartment complexes. You could find pictures and videos of roads with huge piles of dirt on it to block any traveling. There were secretly filmed videos where people just collapsed on the streets and in the waiting rooms at the hospitals.
Contrast that with the glorious 2021 online experience.
Go to YouTube and search for "India covid crisis" and you'll be met with pages and pages of news reports from the big news corporations.
I don't know about you, but this is not the result I expect. In fact, it feels dystopian and scary and that YouTube has lost its purpose.
Maybe you are right about youtube in context of Indian covid. However, the coverage elsewhere in mainstream has been quite graphic in the current wave.
The generalization you're making is far from true, and with most of the comments you're talking about it's pretty easy to see why they'd get downvoted.
Also - the GP comment was about media and censorship, not China, so if downvoters were reacting to the topic of the comment or to the point it was making, it more likely had to do with that. Downvotes on comments making controversial points about divisive topics are to be expected anyhow.
Very weird comment section. It feels really weird to me that you need videos of people blowing up and getting killed to get a reality check. Reading about it and being empathetic should really be enough. Are you guys so out of touch with yourselves and the world? And is it really necessary to consume this taxing content? I mean, I've seen a lot. I lurked on 4chan/krautchan in the early days. But I'm not so sure that was a good thing as I was quite young and I can imagine that it sends some people down the drain and incentivises violence.
I'm really wondering what happens to a brain that is exposed to such things. Now I would be really interested in the psychological effects of such content on our brains. But imho it's just weird to consume that stuff. Also I'm really glad that it's forbidden in Germany to take or publish videos of these things due to personality rights.
There's one hell of a difference between the news reporting of "sectarian murders" and seeing a group of people hitting another group of people with sticks WHILE THEY'RE ON FIRE.
Also I watched the Christchurch stream and there's something about someone seeing another person pleading for help and seeing the cameraman put a bullet in their head that really communicates a horror that words fail to.
For me at least, it humanises the dead (no longer statistics) and demonstrates the true horror of the capacity of human cruelty. Lest we forget.
I won't forget what I've seen, I won't forget how cruel people can be when unshackled and these stories act as significant warnings to me. While the press rationalise the next round of wars I've seen what it looks like and will never want.
> Its not a reality check its more akin to mindfulness meditation. Momento mori, a reminder that it is so easy to die of stupid things in this world.
I find it very weird that you need gore for a memento mori.
> As far as I’m aware, this is not the case for video games and violent movies, so I don’t buy it for liveleak content.
Well, if I think about how I felt while watching this stuff (very, very uneasy) versus how I felt while gaming or watching movies I'd say there's quite a difference. So I would argue that the brain indeed processes those things differently.
> Are you guys so out of touch with yourselves and the world?
in this instance i am living 1-life != 1-life, it just depends. in this instance institutions sugarcoat mass-murders and put people in prisons just for stealing a bread. we have no tool to defend against indoctrination at this scale.
i think it was 10 years ago that i was reading quite about isreal-philistine conflict, the injustices just overwhelms you, you become bitter and bitter, at one point i even hated them, not just the understandable hatred against a government. then i came across to this video, group of rabbies was beaten by police, blood everywhere. they were protesting against government policies. that single video showed me what a tool i was, generalizing group of people...
living an experience is infinitly harder than reading it. and closest thing to living is watching the real footage.
> I'm really wondering what happens to a brain that is exposed to such things
I think this is because EU terreg regulation that was introduced without a vote. Basically services that have EU users (regardless if they use VPN etc) have 1hr SLA to remove any content requested to be deleted.
Have a look https://decoded.legal/blog/2021/04/the-eus-terrorist-content...
Every time I've looked for videos on LiveLeak that I knew would be removed from normal sources over the last few years I didn't get any hits. I actually was just looking for something the other day.
Liveleak opened my eyes to what was really being done by evil people early in my life. I'm not sure I would recommend that to people but it did help me take on the comparably very not evil things I had to deal with day to day.
I'm saddened to hear this! For me, LiveLeak was a real life Safety Training video catalog plus much more. Comments weren't the best attribute of the site but you could keep yourself informed without having to participate. I think that most users related to site it in their own personal way. Some came to view gory videos, some to express their views, while others to see what's new with world.
I'm surprise people say it had gory videos. I've being watching Liveleak for the last year. There were hardly any videos with violence and gore. The videos could be classified into 4 categories: traffic accidents, drunk/stoned people doing stuff, police cam recordings, industrial accidents (cranes, ships crashing etc.)
Am I understanding right that this shutdown happened overnight with no warning? I didn't have any investment in LiveLeak one way or another, but this gushing about how much the community meant to the team rings a little hollow when I imagine there are users angry they didn't have any time to prepare for it.
This is one of the best discussions I've seen in HN so far. It's amazing when great minds think about worldview formation and the role of Internet has on it.
I feel sad about the end of LiveLeak and what the site represented to very curious people like most of us here.
I don't think I've even seen a link to LiveLeak scroll by in 5 or 10 years, but I still had a visceral reaction to seeing the name on the HN frontpage. Saw some really traumatic things on there in the mid/late aughts.
Wow, tbh watching this kind of gore had made me sick to the stomach, yes it haunts me the whole day, but I am also extra alert and gives me a reminder why one shouldn't fool around on the roads, with machines, etc
I don't feel like posting the alternative, but there is a much more extreme alternative to LiveLeak that makes LiveLeak look like eye bleach and I suspect much of LiveLeak's users moved over to it.
LiveLeak was in a weird position because it allowed full on gore but it also kind of tried to pretend to be a serious site reporting actual events. I suspect most people going to LiveLeak were not interested in seeing a legit gore site pretending to be news and just wanted the most hardcore gore they could find, and well the alternative to LiveLeak is exactly that.
I understand you said you don’t want to tell us, but the way you wrote that comment you have to imagine it would generate interest. Can you share it or provide a clue (though since this is HN, I would appreciate it if you shared the knowledge with us). Knowing about these sites is more than the gore. People with kids, journalists, public safety people and more source stuff from these places, and often to do good or inform.
i always understood that liveleak and dailymotion were the same site, and liveleak was just the branding for their less-respectable content.
but this article doesn't make any mention of that, and i can't find any other discussion online of a relationship between the two brands. is this something i just invented in my head?
Despite Hayden being a contemptible goon, liveleak is an institution which now leaves a void. Interesting to see what will take it's place in the interZeitgeist.
I happen to think a lot of the pandemic denial and downplaying had to do with the media's refusal (for valid privacy reasons) to show what was actually going on in ICUs everywhere. The lack of graphic coverage kept the pandemic's worst effects out of sight, out of mind for a lot of people, allowing them to focus on and rage against the less important side-issues like how awful masks are and how upset it made them to not be able to drink at bars for a while. Just like honest, graphic war reporting helped to end Vietnam, honest, graphic COVID reporting could have helped shock people into doing their part to end the pandemic.
I agree with this. Unfortunately, I got covid right out of the gate and should have been in the hospital.
Then I lost some people, one of whom was worth a lot, and despite that still spent 40 some days on a ventilator, basically in hell, only to die pretty terribly.
While all this was going on, I am surrounded by people who think it is all fake, nobody is dying, etc...
I would tell about what I saw, felt and they would just ignore me, or ask me why more of that is not on the TV.
Thanks for sharing. I’m glad you recovered and very sorry about the others. My own family happened to escape it but my wife lost several loved ones.
> While all this was going on, I am surrounded by people who think it is all fake, nobody is dying, etc...
The saddest, craziest stories are the ones who, while the tubes were going in, used their last voluntary breaths to cry “How is this happening? The virus is a hoax!” We need to have a serious reckoning with mental health in this country.
No doubt! I know one of those, and they made it through.
It is rough. I can see them question just about everything and feeling a little lonely, due to their peer group not identifying very well with their struggle.
Yeah, I had a couple loooooong nights deep breathing, eye on an oximeter. Was early enough to feel a lot of angst about going to the hospital! We were not good at treatment yet, people go in, die alone...
Woke me right the fuck up.
Not to say I was anti, but I had not really internalized what was happening. Was not as careful as I could have been. Definitely did not have all the info I could have had.
Those are the worst. They have a mild case and there basically is no convincing them otherwise, unless someone close to them has a different experience.
>unless someone close to them has a different experience.
my partner could not give two trucks that i was sick. through the sleepless gasping nights where i was wondering if it was time to go to the hospital, my partner blamed it on anxiety. when i couldn't feel my feet, my partner thought it was due to me not eating (because food tasted like paper). this all culminated with my partner calling me lazy for sleeping all day. it really woke me up to their attitude and has reshaped the trajectory of our relationship. as of now it's pretty much just a show so our kids don't end up too messed up
Speaking as someone who’s parents when waited to get divorced until I went to college, I think I would have been less messed up if they’d been honest and mature enough to get divorced when they’d wanted to.
Speaking as someone in that same boat, I appreciate my parents kept a semblance of a family for my entire childhood. Hearing my friends who did not have that makes me understand that even my childhood with all of the fighting and arguing was better than that of my peers who did not have a good relationship with one or both of their parents
Could you please explain how you got this number? If I look at the statistics for the most countries in Europe I'll see a ratio of around 2/100 between detected cases and deaths (Germany, Belgium). That would mean that we would have around 5x more cases than we detect ,if we see "mild" as doesn't die. If you define "mild" as "not in hospital" this number would be even higher (meaning in some case that more than 100% of the population of a country would have had covid). So please explain your numbers and reasoning.
Looking at your previous comments, it seems you like to throw out this stat and other... less than factual statements, then never back up your comments or engage in the conversation. You are trolling or misguided.
You are conflating outcomes with cases in progress.
To understand severity, work with outcomes and that is dead people divided by recovered people.
Infected people will eventually arrive at their outcome, but until they have actually ran their infection course, adding them into the risk assessment artificially marginalizes risk.
Early on, before we understood treatment, the outcome numbers, chance of someone dying was quite high, 7 percent or so depending.
It is currently a little over 1 percent and will likely improve as the science does, and our ability to treat cases is managed better. And that assumes we can get people vaccinated in high enough numbers to manage mutation rates.
So far, vaccinated people do not die. Vast improvement over the 1'ish percentage currently in play for unvaccinated people.
Without that, we run the very real risk of a mutation sending us back to the beginning.
I have had this exact conversation with people who died thinking their low risk assessment, dividing dead people by infected people, made sense.
It does not, and it does not because outcomes are being mixed in with cases in progress. It is like combining the wrong units and wondering why nature does not match the math.
I’m just a tad more jaded and think had the reality been shown more, it would just have been spun by media to fit a desired narrative (i.e. what you’re seeing is normal, you’re just see it for the first time, and you should ask why you’re being made to see this now) or worse it would be called fake news/actors (e.g. students who survived school shootings being called actors, or entire school shootings being called fake).
I took it really seriously when I saw videos of hospitals in NYC stacking bodies in a freezer truck because there were just too many. They should have shown that more. I usually assume anchors and reporters exaggerate for ratings today, so they've lost a lot of credibility. When I see a video, I get an unfiltered view of what's going on.
As a side note, I implore people to watch police interaction videos and how often they are captured on video casually violating civil rights as standard operating procedure. YouTube has endless content of this. It will make you think twice about the reality of world you live in. If it bothers you, call your mayor or city government.
Video tends to be more truthful, but news outlets who lie to you, will also only show video that supports their point.
Video helps drive a point home emotionally, but it is not at all a source of less biased reporting. Driving a point home emotionally is important, and the point 'covid bad' seems like it needs to be driven home more. But don't believe news just cause it shows videos.
>but news outlets who lie to you, will also only show video that supports their point.
Oh absolutely. I was thinking more of citizen journalist videos which are typically uncut. One example I know of is when the news video has a hard cut, they're trying to manipulate it. This is pretty common, and they use it often when showing videos of people speaking.
In terms of a "graphic exposé on the reality of COVID" - if you haven't seen "76 Days" yet, I would strongly recommend it. It is a wincingly direct and raw documentary - no editorializing or narrative overlay, just real, high resolution footage of a city of millions of people fending off a deadly virus, shot in close quarters with the physicians attending to those dying and their families.
The US media also just likes to try to protect the emotions of the consumer. Some of the articles I've read of scuba diving accidents in the Mexican press are very NSFW by contrast and they'll just show you a dead guy in a wetsuit. In fact a lot of lifeleak content comes from new stories in other countries. Most Americans don't want to think about death and their own mortality or anyone else's mortality and want NSFW warnings splashed over anything remotely unsettling.
I am European, and I recall seeing Italian nurses warning the rest of Europe to take this seriously. They were saying this because they were running out of ventilators and their morgues were overflowing.
That's when I started taking it seriously, 1 week later my country hit lockdown. This was somewhere in March.
I have comment threads in my country's subreddit from that week, where someone wrote that their partner was returning from a business trip to Italy. Someone wrote, "consider quarantining for a couple of weeks just in case".
The replies in that thread were along the lines of "Pffff...If everyone did that the Earth would stand still, idiot!"
That sort of coverage doesn't sway people who have decided already not to subscribe to facts, domain experts, or reality. Conservatives would be shown videos of known popular conservatives online storming the capitol, and in all serious start claiming that these people were actually secretly Democrats or something there to make conservatives look bad. Some would call these would be videos of ICUs fake, just like some people think the moon landing is fake.
"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." - Orwell.
It can sway people if the truth gets out before the falsehoods take root. I saw the videos from China in early January of people falling over in the streets and emergency rooms. I showed that stuff to my conservative news watching family members before the news here was covering the virus. I believe that saved the ones who would have otherwise believed what conservative media was saying early -- they knew it was real and potentially deadly before anyone could tell them otherwise. They told their friends and showed them the videos from China. The truth can make a difference if it arrives first.
The problem is the conspiracy machine often works faster than the truth. You got there early, many others with the wool over there eyes aren't so lucky, especially when for many their only worldview comes from people with their same biases.
This is probably a "my part of the Titanic is rising!" kind of problem. Doctors have and need some time off as well and doing a dance is good for moral and teamwork. Plus, in some regions, the pandemic is pretty well under control.
This doesn't change the fact that they're currently burning corpses on the streets in India. A bullet missing you by 10cm or 10m does not feel much different; Liveleak showed you the effects of the bullet that did not miss.
Pandemics are non-linear. Pandemic response and fear emptied hospitals almost immediately and reduced normal cases (as well as people delaying treatment in too many cases).
People don't understand exponential phenomenon: a half-full hospital when there's a spreading contagion (with a replication factor ~2) is actually already over capacity. At 33%, with a replication factor of 2, the next influx of patients overwhelms you.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function" - Dr Albert Bartlett, part of his talk "Exponential Growth Arithmetic, population and energy" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4
The common cold does not overwhelm intensive care unit capacity.
The common cold does not require some people to go on ventilators to survive.
This virus is worse than the common cold, by a lot. If treatment is available, it is not incredibly lethal. But treatment resources are finite, and the spread of the virus has been hard to stop.
Spread too much, resources run out and corona lethality spikes. Way before that, resources get diverted from other places, cancer treatments get delayed, nurse vacations get canceled (leading to burn out and hence less capacity in the long run).
Attitudes like this probably contribute a lot to corona spread being hard to reduce. People just ignore measures because "it's not that bad". Sure, your chances of dying if you ignore rules is probably low. But the larger consequences go beyond you.
Another place where actual free exchange of information could happen, gone forever. I don't really blame the site runners; must take balls the size of a planet to host that kind of content, especially now. Sad to see it go though.
That’s really sad. They were one of the few platforms that would carry content honestly no matter how offensive it might be. With how overwhelming the scope and influence of big tech platforms like YouTube are, free speech has few homes left.
Free speech has the entire internet, just don't expect giant public corporations to broadcast and amplify conspiracy theories. No one expects youtube to host porn or gore, but when they take down covid deniers and mass shooting conspiracies people think they are entitled to youtube hosting them.
The idea of informed consent, is you get to know the benefits and risks of any medicine.
Skepticism is valuable too. If anything, human history is littered with dead bodies of those that blindly went along and listened to those in authority.
> just don't expect giant public corporations to broadcast and amplify conspiracy theories.
Unfortunately that is exactly what the giant public corporations are doing. They are running disinfo ops against the public, and it's bizarre how they justify this to themselves (in the name of the antiracism, or the greater good, or achieveing some utopia). What is odd is that there doesn't seem to be a lot of variety in the types of disinfo ops it is OK to run. The "peaceful protests" chyrons emblazoned behind a burning hellscapes is OK. The "we have always been at war with East Asia" kind is OK - and you have to go to rough and tumble corners of the internet to see other conspiracy theories that don't fit the narrative of our nihilistic PMC elite.
Liveleak made me appreciate just how fragile our abstractions of human rights and rule of law are. When the chips are down reality can transform into a hell few can imagine.
Another independent, not US-American, bastion of the free internet is gone. Big tech is more and more monopolistic and more and more censored, as technology follows the imperialist idiosyncrasies of US American political debate.
Everyone's mentioning the many tragic and gory videos they've seen on LiveLeak.
But how were they making money? Also, is it moral to make money out of people's anguish and human tragedy?
I also don't see any mention of why they are shutting down.
Additionally, shouldn't these things be in the realm of journalism? Or is this the new journalism? Shouldn't there be some kind of fact-checking against this?
In today's world where anybody can post videos which elicit responses (and the more responses the better), shouldn't there be some ombudsman?
They lived in a space where no advertiser would work with them, they don't have a 'paid content' feature. General population does not "hang out" on LiveLeak. You go there and then leave.
What is all this about "journalism"? What journal going to feature actual death videos?
I don't believe that any of the videos described were made for views or with the intention of having an audience. Many things go beyond your capacity for empathy if you're oblivious to them and their magnitude – they're shocking for a reason. I don't see wilful ignorance or filtered media as being a solution to any problem, but a big problem in itself. You seem to care about preventing people who "enjoy" this stuff from seeing it more than allowing anyone to see the world for what it is, if they choose.
brutal reality is the only weapon against mass-indoctrination.
can you even imagine if Iraq was a western country? would Syria happen if 1/100000 of Iraq was televised? would Iraq happen if child deaths under sanctions was televised? can empathy see through the fog of indoctrination/demonization/skin-color?
A lot is said about desensitization as a result of seeing horrible things on the internet, but in my experience, only the opposite was true. Seeing violence online when I was in my late teens sensitized me and made the stories on the TV real. Frankly, I owe a lot of my political beliefs (especially on foreign policy) to horrible realities I saw on Liveleak.