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.
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.