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LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

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Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#631
post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 regular…

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.

For what it's worth there's still r/CombatFootage

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Source or example? 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,…

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.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#633

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…

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 thes…

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.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#634
post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful with that stuff. There are only so many scars you can accumulate before it really affects you. Life will give you scars all by itself eventually, no need to seek them out.

Or, you can embrace the abyss and find out what's on the other side.

Which, keep in mind, could very well be horrific emotional damage, PTSD, nightmares, regret, etc.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#635
post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human biodiversity, intelligence variation, black-on-white and black-on-Asian crime statistics, connection between homosexuality and pedophilia, George Floyd saying “I can’t breathe” before the officers ever touched him and having a lethal dose of fentanyl in his system, rate of unarmed blacks killed by police being lower than the black proportion of violent crime. All of these 100% true facts (no value judgments in…

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by human biodiversity. As for the others on your list, non-alt-right people (cf. non-alt-right sites) might be more inclined to discuss (cf. host discussions about) these "facts" if their primary use wasn't to be woven into otherwise fictional narratives claiming to be coherent justifications of racism and homophobia.

> these "facts" if their primary use wasn't to be woven into otherwise fictional narratives claiming to be coherent justifications of racism and homophobia.

So, the same thing mainstream society has been doing for the last 6 years, just for different races and groups?

If they criticized things like Outreachy (which literally discriminates people based on race and gender [1]) with the same energy that they criticize the "alt-right" then I would believe them. Otherwise it's just hypocrisy.

[1] https://www.outreachy.org/docs/applicant/

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

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.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#637

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…

Your first point, sad as it is, reminded me of this article I read, which gives clarity on how child soldiers are made in a way that I haven't read elsewhere, despite reading books on exactly that subject https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p... Not related, but I'll just close by saying I didn't have the same respect that I now have for rotating shafts at industrial facilities until I saw some…

Good for you! I can't stand the dismissive attitude toward unprotected rotating shafts.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#638

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…

Reading 'Maus' by Art Spiegelman had a similar impact on me.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems we're already getting a bit heated, as neither you nor I mentioned something about "wholesomeness" but here we are. My point is not that alt-right opinions are wholesome, but rather that since they don't have a lot of places they can write their opinions without getting overrun by opposition, it's only natural they'll retract into properties where they can freely talk. For example: If you're of the opinion that…

Opinions based on bigotry or reducing rights or "legalness" of a person based off of who they love, what skin color they have, what gender they have are all invalid opinions. I should not have to debate a bigot and act like their views are worth debating.

You seem as intolerant as the people you deride for their intolerance.

Re: LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online

#640
post #609
post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. The comments consisted of both extremes: analytical, reflective or informative responses, paired with "haha he got OWNED!" type of comments. The latter made me really wonder if those commenters had ever experienced loss or hardship in their lives.

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…

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.
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