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.
The "didactic" tone is quite patent: don't jaywalk, drive and use machinery with care, use adequate protective gear...
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.
The most recent one I saw: "A trooper-involved fatal shooting in Leonardtown that ended in the death of a 16-year-old."
Both the "trooper-related" and the "ended in" passive voice to avoid saying "a trooper shot and killed a child."
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.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/14/us/peyton-ham-maryland-tr...
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.
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"...
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.
My point is that a press title "In a chaotic situation a trooper shot and killed..." seems more appropriate to me. Do you agree?
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.
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).
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.roadpeace.org/download/crash-not-accident-briefi...
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.
I read a story 3 days ago. 2 days ago, I'm about to back up - but I get out of my car and look for my kid (she was safe).
I think it also played a role in my purchase and use of safety goggles.
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.
Anyone else experience this?
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.
Keep your dogs on a leash in public people!
Suffice to say I am firmly in favor of wearing safety equipment even for "simple" jobs, and trying to avoid pissing people off.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulf_War_Did_Not_Take_Plac...
> 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”.
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.
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."
edit: grammar
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.
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.
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?
[0] http://www.filmsufi.com/2010/05/lessons-of-darkness-werner-h...
> this war began and ended
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.
[1] https://archive.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/histor...
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
I disagree strongly with this. That's what the powerful want you to think and feel—that your opinion has no significance. Fortunately, it's not true.
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 think one has to have hope.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Car accidents are exactly that, accidents.
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.
https://www.bikede.org/2011/11/28/we-have-too-many-stroads/
The takeaway is that streets and roads have different goals, and when that's not acknowledged we wind up with the misery that is driving in US towns.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-01-07/defining-...
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.
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.
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).
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'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?
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.
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.
Separate bike lanes, more like the sidewalks, not just painted lines on the car roads.
Roundabouts instead of crossings and traffic lights. (Roundabouts force the drivers to slow down. And on average, saves time I think)
More trains, buses, subways.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I disagree.
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.
- James 4:14
True, but that part of the reality of war is hardly relevant. I don’t need to emphasize with the bored soldiers. That’s part of life for me too.
I emphathize with the bored soldiers that suddenly had a massive bomb land in their midst.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_turn
Words increasingly constitute reality, rather than being referents to some external reality.
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.
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...
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.
Or shutting down subs that might make the site advertiser unfriendly.
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.
The latter made me really wonder if those commenters had ever experienced loss or hardship in their lives.
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.
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.
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.
It isn't, you are lucky to be in a privileged environment.
And I don't even mean warzones. 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.
Further supporting the argument that the world is not "mostly an OK place".
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.
"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
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
Just to clarify:
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
You may find this interesting:
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.
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 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.
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.
- [0] https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Bett...
OP said 'scary and violent', and on that scale things really aren't that bad.
Considering they all go on living anyway, you’d say the good parts must outweigh the bad parts though.
People aren’t killing themselves, so even if their life sucks in many ways they must have found enough good things in the world to balance them out.
The original premise somewhere further up was that poor people are never happy.
I guess I should have used a less extreme point.
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.
That's a weird lens to see the world through
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.
Radical evangelicals like radical Islam think they are the "pure form" of their religion.
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
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!
Sites like Liveleak may remind you that war isn't the choreography that your governments want you to think it is.
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.
~30 years ago, the Rodney King beating and the movie Natural Born Killers were shocking.
Today, it's just another day.
I wouldn't conflate movies and real life. A snuff film is not the truth. Woody Harrelson is not a murderer, Derek Chauvin is.
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 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.
That doesn't happen anymore cause we've killed off most of the bugs...
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210206111359/https://www.levan...
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.
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 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.
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).
While you continue your search, I can make a recommendation to you, it’s a YT channel: https://youtube.com/c/HealthyGamerGG
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.
And here’s a guide to therapy, I found it super helpful: https://youtu.be/YuLfFqPFrkc
Best of luck!
Yes. Do notice I removed the "just" from the quote.
Look into treating yourself with mdma or psilocybin.
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.
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 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.
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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/12/why-i-can...
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.)
Such things indeed play a vitally important role.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are we having problems finding horrible things to watch other than on Liveleak... because I sure am not...
I really don't think Liveleak is some paragon of "truth" or the content you describe.
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 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.
my point holds nonetheless.
and - being downvoted on HN becomes more and more an endorsement afaic tell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94afIBzOb5I
Fair warning: The video shows the murder.
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.
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.
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.
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.