Live data from Hacker News

LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

techstartups.com

251–260 of 717 posts

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#251
post #216

Why is there so much fetishization of violent content in the comments? Sure maybe liveleak provided some footage you couldn't get on youtube and that is indeed a loss, but to think that the violence you see represents the truth is just as bad as denying that any bad happens in the world. The world is far larger than any one mind can handle. I wouldn't judge it from a few videos taken out of context. The world can be…

I'll just repeat my previous comment because I actually feel this is important: I've gotten absolutely zero enjoyment from the few that I've watched. They make me feel completely sick and scared for myself and my family and I think about how incomprehensibly horrible it must be to live through these events, either as someone who died or someone who watched or knew the person who died. However, I am much more careful with my daughter and prone to take precautions after having watch them. I think they provide value, I absolutely do not get the same effect from reading or learning about bad things that can happen to me, my brain just never really considered it a real option until I saw it happen. And yes, I probably have PTSD from them, but I am not a careful person naturally so I feel they have probably had a positive effect on me and made my family safer because of that.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. Th…

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?

[0] http://www.filmsufi.com/2010/05/lessons-of-darkness-werner-h...

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#253

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…

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.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#254
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are the worst. They have a mild case and there basically is no convincing them otherwise, unless someone close to them has a different experience.

I mean, that's 99.6% of everyone that gets it. In which case everything everyone here is saying has been blown out of proportion.

Looking at your previous comments, it seems you like to throw out this stat and other... less than factual statements, then never back up your comments or engage in the conversation. You are trolling or misguided.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

>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".

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.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#256

Four LiveLeak videos will always stay in my head. WARNING: even in text this stuff is horrifying. Stop reading if you don’t want to have nightmares. 1) an ISIS video where a 7 year old kid or so goes through a building where a bunch of hostages are tied up. He shoots them dead in succession. He looks like he’s about to cry throughout the whole video — but he doesn’t. 2) a completely covered up woman(?) in Iran is exe…

I stopped visiting the site after viewing a video of cartel torture that was worse than anything I'd ever seen. I still see it in my head all the time. Although LL certainly helped meet the morbid curiosity a lot of us have, I am ultimately glad it's now harder to find this kind of content.

Did seeing that clip make you a worse person?

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

>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".

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.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LiveLeak definitely had the ability to change you. There was a video from a dashcam where a couple is driving down a road, and a brick or rock falls off a truck driving the opposite way. It bounces on the road before slamming through the windshield and instantly killing the wife sitting in the passenger seat. Whenever I feel like a member of my family has gotten on my last nerve, pushed me to my limit, I think of the…

After seeing countless videos of car/trucks/lorries with unstable load, my dad has been very annoyed with me whenever I need to help him drive a trailer around with stuff. He just throw shit onto it, an leave it. I lock that shut down, hard. I'm not gonna be that one person who accidently killed someone one the road, because I had something come loose.

Same here. I believe watching that video (with follow up discussion about what happened) should be mandatory for getting your driving license.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the lack of graphic Covid videos isn't because people are too shy to post them. Covid is nasty, but at the end it's just another respiratory viral disease, a.k.a. "common cold". It's just that before we ignored the human toll of the "common cold". (Yes, it is nasty and causes e.g. strokes and heart attacks and pneumonia. It's a leading cause of death that we never bothered to report before because we're so de…

| it's just another respiratory viral disease, Except it's literally not, it's a vascular disease.

And neurological.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-study-unco...

I cannot believe people post such easily debunked denialism.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some months back I saw footage of a lathe accident in a Russian factor (it was on Reddit but possibly the footage was linked from LiveLeak). Similar to you I have developed a much stronger respect for heavy machinery. It's even made me more careful when I use obviously much smaller power tools at home. Tools like circular saws, mitre saws, and even angle grinders have the ability to irreversibly change your life (or…

Circular saws, mitre saws are sold with protective elements where I live. To respect, but it won't jump out and hurt you. Angle grinders are next level, fundamental "respect or you'll be maimed" stuff. Angular momentum is not as fundamentally easy to judge and is easily underestimated.

> Circular saws, mitre saws are sold with protective elements where I live. To respect, but it won't jump out and hurt you.

That's true but they're not sufficient to protect against all injuries if you don't take proper precautions. And, as far as circular saws go, you're flat out wrong about them not jumping and hurting you: if they bind up in the wood that's exactly what can happen in the worst case. It's called kickback.

Post reply on HN