Slashdot Mirror
A Suicide Goes Viral On the Internet
Hugh Pickens writes "Will Oremus reports that Fox News showed a grisly spectacle Friday afternoon during a live car chase when the suspect got out of his car, stumbled down a hillside, pulled a gun, and shot himself in the head. As the scene unfolded, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith grew increasingly apprehensive, then yelled 'get off it, get off it!,' belatedly urging the show's producers to stop the live feed as it became obvious the man was going to do something rash. Fox News cut awkwardly to a commercial just after showing his death and after Fox aired the on-air suicide, Smith apologized to viewers, saying, 'We really messed up.' However BuzzFeed immediately posted the footage on YouTube, where it garnered more than 1,000 'likes' in under an hour, sparking immediate blowback. 'Who's worse? @FoxNews for airing the suicide, or @BuzzFeed for re-posting the video just in case you missed it the first time?' posted the Columbia Journalism Review. Gawker's Hamilton Nolan called his site's decision to post the video 'ethical,' because 'it is news' but research suggests that graphic depictions of suicide in the media can spur copycat suicides, especially among young people, and the World Health Organization's guidelines warn against sensationalizing it. Virtually everyone who has studied it agrees that, at a minimum, suicides should be covered with a modicum of sensitivity and context (PDF). 'Of course it's news that Fox News accidentally aired the video. And you can make a good case that Fox was inviting this type of debacle with its habit of airing live car-chase feeds. But Fox couldn't have known that it was about to air a suicide. BuzzFeed, by contrast, knew exactly what it was doing,' writes Oremus. 'That might be good business for BuzzFeed, but it's hard to see the benefit for anyone else.'"
Before anyone starts jumping on Fox News for whatever axe they have to grind with them, please substitute Fox News with "CNN" or "MSNBC" and ask yourself if your vitriol would be just the same.
That's one of the more disturbing comments I've seen on /.
Wife and I were watching this live. It was shocking to say the least. I'm sad to say I've now witnessed two suicides live on television over the years. Live television is difficult since people can be so unpredictable.
... because Shepard Smith, in his apology, said they inserted a 5 second delay, which is what it's there for.
Someone not hitting the switcher fast enough was bound to happen sooner or later, given Fox's practices.
--
BMO
BEYOND not funny. Pretty much about as not funny as Buzzard Feed.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
We baby this country. Media censorship creates a population that's oversensitive to real issues like suicide, and it leads to people being offended by things they simply don't like. To censor things like this is silliness.
Gawker's Hamilton Nolan moral compass is way off, but greed has a tendency to do that. It was not ethical to repost the suicide just a cheap very sad grab to profit from it. They could of edited the video and posted a great article with class, dignity etc. but when your moral compass is pointing towards greed well there's the results. I'll stop ranting now :)
in a world full of war for the purpose of promoting democracy where thousands of civilians die from the fighting or aftermath? Oh yah we don't directly see it so its ok.... Out of sight out of mind.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Showing a suicide live on air is, in my opinion, going to far. The feed should have been cut earlier. On the other hand, the local media in my current home town has a policy of ignoring suicides completely and there have been some which would have been reasonably high profile if anyone had known. The suicide rate here is over 3 times the national average but the issue is swept under the carpet in case it takes away from our sunny, happy image and damages tourism. My concern is that it takes away awareness of the problem and leads to fewer resources for those who feel suicidal.
So tired of the "Darwin" meme. It expresses a sense of smug superiority that is entirely undeserved.
And it wasn't Smith's fault. _All_ live feeds are supposed to have at least a five second delay, which is under control of the production crew. This is to prevent just these kinds of incidents. Also, Merkins don't like nipples, so it prevents those showing as well.
If the five second delay fails, you don't get the live feed out of the console- you get nothing.
Yes the signal can be routed around the delay, but that takes an intentional act.
Smith, who is just about the only reasonably ethical on air FOX personality, is taking this hard.
Murder is "at best" a form of population control, and certainly involves "Darwin" - the strongest murderers survive. Can we at least not interfere in this one?
Let's face it: suicide happens. You'll get far more suicides happening by not talking about it than you will by revealing the truth to people - even if a few copycat suicides in the immediate aftermath are inevitable. Hint: people don't just kill themselves because they've seen a death, but may simply have seen a method for doing something they wanted to do anyway.
Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries are far less hypocritical with the news than Anglo-Saxon countries, frequently showing gruesome injuries or cadavers. If you're going to report the "news", it cannot just be the things which echo your opinions or which make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.
tl;dr We cannot be as Victoria who pulls down the shutter to her Royal Train when travelling past the Dark Satanic Mills which society has built.
Seeing the mod war parent is going through, I have to ask: what is it with suicide that riles people up? The news air shootings all the time, and a lot of homicides are shown on camera - that's pretty much ok, it seems. But why are suicides a no-no? If you ask me, they're way less shocking, since no one is forcefully overriding anyone's will.
Those 10 seconds delays aren't electronics lag.
What is so bad about showing suicides?
It does not even sound like they showed it insensitivly, it was just footage of the event (it is not like the anchor was yelling "do it").
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The question is whether TV directly influenced the suicide. That doesn't seem to have been the case here. This was apparently a failed crook who didn't want to go to jail.
It would be different if someone was attempting suicide to get attention, as in threatening to jump from a building, and that was covered on live TV. Then coverage would directly affect the odds of someone jumping.
Gawker is utter trash. Nobody should ever read or link to any of their sites.
Dunno, I sent that exact question to foxnewstips@foxnews.com yesterday but haven't received a reply yet.
Guess they're still thinking it over.
That's because just about everyone thinks suicide is evil, selfish, wrong, etc. Unless you're a pedophile, then do everyone a favor and go shoot yourself.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
But Fox couldn't have known that it was about to air a suicide.
Yes, they absolutely could, and did. A five-second delay was added when the guy got out of his car (why then and not before, and why it wasn't a one-minute delay, I don't know) but for reasons unknown it was, apparently, the in-studio monitors that got the delayed feed instead of the viewers.
Want to avoid this in future? Put a one-minute delay in - at least then it will be obvious if you've mis-switched it. My impression of American news hints that this happens often enough that it wouldn't be unreasonable to have a special circuit added for this sort of thing. Then you've also got the added advantage of not struggling to narrate events as they happen - the gallery can clue you in on what's coming up, and you can even advise sensitive viewers to look away if something surprising but non-fatal happens.
Of course, you could always try not appealing to lowest-common-denominator literal car-crash television in the first place.
<satire>PS Imagine how much worse the outrage would be if the guy had waved his wang at the helicopter.</satire>
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Ironic, isn't it?
I this were reddit, the link to the video would be top post.
this kind of thing should be on a err "positive action" switch were the person has to keep the button pressed to enable the feed (maybe a pair of switches wired in parallel to allow for the guy to switch hands??). This way if he goes WTF?!!?? his natural body movement will disable the feed.
and Buzzfeed should be served with a DCMA notice for violating the Copyright of Fox News.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
The benefit is that it gives us proof that Fox News is constantly making dumb editorial decisions. They are performing a public service, mainly because people enjoy watching the mass media goof up, especially if it involves Fox News.
Now that's or MSM..... Not news. So they apologize when they accidently show something real
Yes, nobody who dies from suicide could possibly have ever contributed anything to the benefit of society.
Wouldn't the headline mean that after seeing the live feed, the viewers would start killing themselves in live feeds of their own? Anyway, I hope the ad after the newsflash was for headache pills. You know, context ads...
Ezekiel 23:20
Let's face it: suicide happens. You'll get far more suicides happening by not talking about it than you will by revealing the truth to people - even if a few copycat suicides in the immediate aftermath are inevitable. Hint: people don't just kill themselves because they've seen a death, but may simply have seen a method for doing something they wanted to do anyway.
This is true, but they've noticed correlations between different ways that suicide is discussed and the suicide rate following it. The suicide rate tends to go down if it is discussed in a way that includes urging people who are thinking about it to get help. However, when someone's glorified for their suicide and no one says to get help if you're thinking about it, suicide rates tend to go up. Of course, that's all just correlation, not causation, but it is interesting.
The problem are the people that watch people die.
If you really want to sea people die, i guell there is enought material on the net for them to fap to.
This discussion should not be about: whats worse: airing the suicide or reposting it, but about: why do people like to watch others die...
What possible good could come out of that? At best it's hugely uninteresting, at worst it glamorises criminality. Glad we don't have that on TV over here.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
I watched the unedited footage, it wasn't that bad. In Europe they show traffic accidents in all their horror, burned bodies and all.
I just don't get why this is such a big deal. I loath Fox News because they're the propaganda arm of the GOP, not because of something trivial like this.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I could have been much, much worse it could have been a woman exposing her breasts after she got out of the car. Then Fox News would be in real big trouble.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
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Seriously, I was expecting at least 5 people posting the link by this time. Internet, I've known you wrong.
and every western news agency was cheering on as the bombs dropped without a single care for the thousands killed and maimed for every fireball you saw on your screen.
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That's understandable - people who wanted to do it might be pushed over the edge in the few days after. But, looking again at context, I'm not sure that the statistic is very useful. In the long term, does a graphic depiction of suicide cause people to talk about suicide more? And does that cause people to get help?
Of course things can be horrible for first/third party survivors of the immediate copycat methods, but would they have eventually attempted suicide anyway? IOW does anyone seriously think that not talking about suicide stops people ever killing themselves?
In the long term, it seems better to confront reality rather than to pan away the moment someone might be in danger of revealing it.
In their drive for the sensational, they've stumbled upon the old, highly unethical "snuff video" genre. I wonder if their ex-commentator/madman Glen Beck would approve.
Now its out on the Internet. I sense a new angle for net censorship coming in 3...2...1...
one minute is no longer live. ...And now, I'm left to wonder why did he do it, who was he and so forth. and the whole fucking reporting around this is just centered on if it was right for them to show what happened.
the whole thing is stupid. they were filming a chase.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The good news is that invoking the Darwin meme doesn't make one immune from it.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
Maybe I'm just a desensitized product of the times, but I fail to see why this is a big deal. The video isn't disturbing to me. There's no blood or brain matter shown, no audio. A far cry from something like the detailed Bud Dwyer suicide that aired live sometime back in the 80s I think. I still cringe when I think about seeing it.
Suicide is a reality. As a society we need to drop the taboo and understand suicide, genocide, war, etc. are all too real. I'd argue it is society, not me, who is really desensitized. Out of sight out of mind as a previous comment stated. The problem won't go away if you bury your head in sand. These things are shocking, sometimes disturbing, but they should be. Rather than ignoring them we should shed more light on them instead of living in a round corners, padded, molded plastic half true reality.
Truckin like the Doo-Dah man...
You can blame Fox and BuzzFeed all you want. But the simple and ultimate fact is they are only giving the people what they want to see. If there wasn't a demand for it, Fox wouldn't be broadcasting it and BuzzFeed wouldn't be posting it. In America, "if it bleeds, it leads".
As far as TV news in general goes, there hasn't been a decent newscast in America since Walter Cronkite retired. And yes, I'm that damned old :(
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
There is also the probability that the outcome would have been gruesome in some other way. There could have been an accident where people would have been hurt or killed, or the cops or the perp could have used violence against the other side. Fox News knows this.
Showing a car chase live is only sensationalist entertainment. It has no real news value. If you learn anything from it, it may be afterwards, or not at all. If it should be shown on TV at all, it should be shown in the context of something with a substance.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
10 seconds delay will give you plenty of time to pull the feed and still leave it looking live...
wankers...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Sanitizing events lets people avoid confronting reality.
People should KNOW what death and violence and other Bad Shit look like, not masturbate to the Tasty Car Chase then cut to commercial.
PC bullshit is just another US Media Failure. Show the truth, even when that Truth is dead people. Actions have real consequences.
BTW, war is made more acceptable by not showing dead own-side troops. The "Greatest Generation" could face truth, so we have no excuse.
Would Faux News show this?
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tM-QyTu2WtM/T6UrDoXUuiI/AAAAAAAAJHg/04qvGEII8Dg/s640/brutal-war-images-pictures-ww2-battle-tarawa.jpg
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
So you're saying that in an organization that employs hundreds of people at all kinds of levels and facilities, there are some people that don't mind this attention or the ratings? Do you care to make any other leaps of faith?
But Fox couldn't have known that it was about to air a suicide
"Who could possibly have known?"
Correct. I think the idea that people go with that data is that it SHOULD be discussed, but it should be discussed with the respect that it can be a very sensitive subject for many people out there. Not talking about it isn't going to change anything, but talking about it can push the thoughts people are having about it to the surface. Those thoughts being brought to the surface can be a good thing, if they are dealt with in a healthy manner, but if they're not dealt with, they can push someone over the edge--all that some people need is to have it brought out.
For example, I think one year in my high school. Right at the beginning of the school year, one student committed suicide. Now, this was a large high school, where the vast majority of people didn't have a clue who this kid was. But word spread to everyone, and nothing was really done about it. By the time the first semester ended, there were six more suicides, at which point the school finally started doing something about it, talking about it regularly and offering counseling for anyone with a free pass to get out of class to go talk to someone about it and deal with it in a healthy manner. There was still a couple of more suicides in the second semester, but it was noticeably improved over the rash of them that went through the first semester. And that ended up being a policy that the school held on to, and it seemed to work--the suicide rate ended up below the normal before the extreme high that hit that one semester.
Yes, they absolutely could, and did. A five-second delay was added when the guy got out of his car (why then and not before, and why it wasn't a one-minute delay, I don't know)
As I understand it a five second delay has become the de facto delay for all "live" events to stop swearing (bleeping), wardrobe malfunctions, flashers and whatever else would hurt America's sensibilities. The reason it's not more than 5 seconds is obvious for sports games - if it was a minute other people would get the result on texts and blogs and radio ruining it for the people watching. Okay maybe in this case a minute would have been fine but I understand why they didn't make it harder than delay/no delay. And they even managed to screw that up....
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Does one really care? Living creatures die all the time. I bet you've crushed your share of spiders and insects. I've also seen a few animals expire before my eyes. Those were more traumatic to me than watching some blurry stranger shoot his brains out.
There was no way for them to know the dude was gonna cap himself, so it's not really their fault. I guess you could argue for a time delay, but meh, doesn't seem like a big deal to me. I thought it was handled the best it could be, given the circumstances.
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Sorry, no. Yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater is generally accepted as a limitation of free speech. It's a crime, and it should be a crime. Likewise, suicides should not be shown on TV. They are much more harmful than your average TV violence. It is well-established in the psychology literature that seeing a suicide in detail can be enough to push someone who's borderline-suicidal over the edge. Do some reading.
yah if you want to remove yourself have fun but taking kids/critters with you?? NO
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Darwin Award is fine. It's just when people use the title where it wouldn't apply. You don't simply kill yourself and get an "award." You kill yourself in some kind of spectacularly stupid way, that results in your accidental death, implying that you just took place in natural selection.
A dude shooting himself in the head is just a suicide.
Hemingway ruined english class for pretty much EVERYONE. Don't put him in the same class as Cobain.
Fixed that for you.
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
Live executions need to happen, otherwise we won't get the Running Man show ever!
Why do you want the media to censor what it shows you? They didn't influence the guy shooting himself in any way. I'd rather just see what happened than have TV executives "protect me".
Eye on the TV
'cause tragedy thrills me
Whatever flavour
It happens to be like;
Killed by the husband
Drowned by the ocean
Shot by his own son
She used the poison in his tea
And kissed him goodbye
That's my kind of story
It's no fun 'til someone dies
Could we have your name and address so we can make sure not to help you WHEN you get sick and infirm.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I honestly think that if we are going to commit state-sponsored murder we should force the masses watch what is done in their name.
Good-bye
Too soon (or something moronic such as that)!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Smug superiority? He was a criminal that killed himself after putting the lives of many innocent people at risk. Most people ARE better than that piece of human garbage.
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That's funny, because the societies that protect the weak tend to be the strongest in the world, while those that persecute the weak tend to end up in the dustbin of history. Perhaps this is because a compassionate society that cares for its weaker members makes everyone stronger. And perhaps mental illness doesn't hurt society nearly as much as the traits of indifference and contempt.
From looking at different cultures, it seems the suicide rate decreases when it is talked about continuously, as opposed to the US way of talking about it everywhere for 24-48 hours after each one then silence until the next.
Learn to love Alaska
Because you're not as offended by something as I am, I hereby deem you to be a sociopath.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
When did we lose the capability to sympathize with the families of those affected?
I'd guess about the time that we stopped being able to trust that people were bringing their kids up with a value system that we could relate to.
To politicise this, when we lost faith that our elected representatives were in any way cognisant of our wishes with respect to the way we are governed and our tax monies spent.
When life got so damn hard that suicide was just another symptom of depression brought about by failure of the state to put money into education, welfare and freedoms instead of criminalising cannabis, waging war on second world countries and terrorising people who want to go on holiday just to get away from the rat race that our lives have become of these days.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
That's because just about everyone thinks suicide is evil, selfish, wrong, etc.
Really? I don't. I just think it's sad.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
When did we become a society completely incapable of empathy?
As far as I'm aware, we didn't. The fact that certain people aren't as offended or sad about a random stranger's death as you doesn't mean that they don't feel empathy at all. Go be in agony if you think it'll improve the situation.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
The fact that suicides keep happening is evidence that memes > genes.
Maybe in some years, someone makes an all-suicide-channel and uses it to "balance the stupid fucking budget".
Maybe we'll have people signing in, if the channel gives them some free appliance.
Youtube George Carlin for reference.
The music industry, in attempting to sell the world "the next nirvana" was what ruined POP MUSIC during the 90's. If that's all you listened to, that's your fault. Kurt Cobain was an artist in the truest sense of the word, caring about nothing other than creating what he saw as art.
"You idiots, we could have teased this!"
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
Can we please let stupid people die? I mean really ... Let. Them. Die.
DO NOT TAUNT THE OCTOPUS
Totally agreed. What is "wrong" or "evil" about suicide? The only thing I can think of is the feelings of loved ones, which, in reality, is a pretty "selfish" thing to feel.
Is it compassion to force someone that wants to die to live? Let's look at the person who committed suicide here - he was probably going to prison, and knowing US prisons death might have been a less cruel alternative. So why not let him die on his own terms?
The more that remove themselves from it, the better.
Since you feel so strongly about it, why don't you kill yourself. I don't suppose your genes would be missed either. My guess: you have a big ego that says your life is more important than anybody else. Which gets me back to the smug sense of superiority.
You know you've done wrong when a degenerate from Gawker shambles out of their circuit party to rationalize it.
When a society is successful, it finally has the luxury of protecting its weakest members. You may have your cause and effect reversed.
The bad news is that proving your stupidity by invoking brainless memes doesn't cause immediate death,
I got a flamebait and a troll, but they were still overwealmed by insightfuls. Maybe Slashdot is finally growing up.
That first part didn't make any sense.
And some lives are worth more than others. We take years from peoples' finite lives, with imprisonment, all the time. We execute people. We war with enemies. I'm afraid our species has agreed that different lives have different value since the beginning of our history.
The "life" of the guy that shot himself in the video was worth less than most, according to both him and most of the rest of the world. I know it's polite to argue otherwise, but it's the only rational observation.
So while I applaud your politeness, and appreciate that you feel strongly about it, your conclusions are inconsistent with reality.
Hey, maybe those people were just pissed off at society taking their contributions and treating them like dirt, and decided to go on strike in a rather final way. If that's the case, trying to stop the suicide is just strikebreaking.
Turing particularly got the short end of the stick; Van Gogh famously sold only one painting in his lifetime, not counting "sales" to his brother. He also ate his paint and likely wouldn't have produced what he did if he wasn't crazy already.
He may also be simply pulling it out of his ass. It may have some truth to it if you either limit it to the 20th century or later or if you exclude those enslaved from being categorized as weaker members of society, but without those provisos, it's almost laughably false.
Up until the 20th century, social safety nets didn't really exist. The closest to it were debtors prisons, indentured servitude and even outright slavery. And it's hard to argue that Roman, Egyptian and the European Monarchy societies aren't the strongest in history given how long the period was when they were the dominant societies on earth.
That's the real story here. Not that he committed suicide, but that he'd rather die than get caught (again?). Every law we have and every rule we enforce is about being a deterrant to going to jail. When death is more attractive than jail, laws no longer mean anything.
They'll want to control how much this video gets around for this reason. It's not about people seeing a suicide, it's about the awareness that death is a more viable solution than jail for many.
It's a video embodiment of "nothing to lose", and that sort of thing scares the people who have much to lose rather shitless and for good reason.
In all seriousness, though, while people do kill themselves sometimes, evolution does play a role here. People who are resistant to suicide are more likely to reproduce and spread their genes, so the problem of suicide is not likely to ever be a serious problem on a mass social scale, or even a threat to the survival of our species.
Because to most of us, it is meaningless.
After about the 16 millionth time someone tried to gain advantage by playing on that sympathy.
Why? We're demonstrably superior in that respect at least.
That's funny, because the societies that protect the weak tend to be the strongest in the world, while those that persecute the weak tend to end up in the dustbin of history.
Thats true... of the societies that protect the weak from the strong. That is, from being victimized by the strong.
That is not and never will be true concerning protecting adult people from themselves. In that case, there is no victim. Pretending that there is amounts to treating chronological adults like mental and spiritual infants. The only effect it can have is to cripple and retard their ability to deal with reality, make sound decisions, and actually live life. In fact that would be a living death. It would destroy the joy, meaning, and purpose that life has to offer.
It also makes it easier to institute a totalitarian cradle-to-grave state, because adults who cannot deal with reality and make good decisions need some kind of authority to tell them how to live. That's bad for everyone.
Perhaps this is because a compassionate society that cares for its weaker members makes everyone stronger.
Sometimes compassion requires the fortitude to respect the way people want to live (or not live) their lives, and to restrain your urge to appoint yourself the judge and jury concerning how they should deal with life.
Besides which, if there are no sometimes dire consequences and no bad examples, how do you expect someone to mature into a person who is fully human? You can't do that if you cannot make your own decisions and reap the consequences. No matter how hard you try.
And perhaps mental illness doesn't hurt society nearly as much as the traits of indifference and contempt.
I hate to break it to you but there are plenty of criminals who are not mentally ill (i.e. not legally insane). Some people are simply evil and they understand fully what they are doing. Your compassion is wasted on such people -- they interpret it as weakness and exploitability. In fact the more sociopathic types will let you believe you're doing good so long as they can take advantage of you. You have to have the judgment to tell the difference. There is no algorithm for doing so.
To speculate, did you ever think that by the time the chase ended, perhaps this individual preferred death over being pounded in the ass by Bubba for a couple of decades? Maybe you would have chosen Bubba, but you must admit someone else might not.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
That seems hard to believe, since the elderly have an higher suicide rate than the average. Got any sources on that?
Dilbert RSS feed
Not to mention life choices != the gene pool.
I agree with the literal meaning but I don't share your desire to dismiss the idea entirely.
Life choices tend to represent life style. It's more of a cultural matter where upbringing and social environment intersects with the degree to which that person is an individual. People who get themselves killed (deliberately or accidentally) are not affecting the gene pool very much.
What they are doing is providing an example of what one who follows that life style ("path" if you like) can expect. For example, you can look at the kind of life the average crackhead has and that alone will convince a rational person not to become a crackhead.
What they are doing is removing their influence from those who may not be so individualistic, who may copycat because someone else did it, who are impressionable rather than rational when shown a bad example.
Call it mental or social or some kind of non-physical unnatural selection.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Smug superiority? He was a criminal that killed himself after putting the lives of many innocent people at risk. Most people ARE better than that piece of human garbage.
A lot of people have this perverted sense of compassion that involves sympathy for the Devil himself, so that they may show everyone what a great and noble person they are. The compassion would rightly be for those he endangered. The criminal himself is not a victim.
And there also seems to be a great deal of denial about the fact that once in a while, a rabid dog needs to be put down. No one wants to put it down, but it cannot be reasoned with and it can only pose a threat. Ideally "put down" means imprisonment and rehabilitation so they can go on to live a decent life, but sometimes it happens the way this story did. It's a harsh reality that seems to drive many into some kind of fluffy-bunny world where nothing is ever truly bad. Those very same people can sleep soundly at night only because the police and military are willing to do their violence or threat of violence for them. But they like to forget that.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Supposedly, they are only hypocrites if they personally supported the "killing of brown people". The fact that the majority of the country did or not support the wars doesn't make them hypocrites.
As for the gory scenes in movies, you do realize that nobody actually dies when that happens, right? I don't know about you, but I personally happen to respect real people more than I respect characters of fiction, and that includes watching their deaths.
So many people suddenly "care" about this worthless POS
I have no idea if this is true, but have you considered the fact that they may not actually care about him, but about not wanting to be part of a society that live broadcasts people's suicides, or live chases for that matter?
Personally, I don't live in such society and I can tell you that I'm pretty glad for that fact.
Dilbert RSS feed
First, the dude killed himself on public land, in public view... so anybody in the vicinity could see it... Fox was not airing some private thing, it aired an act committed willingly in the public forum.
Second, Every time Fox airs a high-speed chase the person being chased gets caught and goes to prison. There are not enough places in America where people still see the old traditional "crime does not pay" message. If every high-speed chase ended with the chas-ee being dead, there would likely be fewer chases... and make no mistake every time somebody leads cops on a chase (no matter the justification) he/she endangers the lives of many drivers and pedestrians.
Third, we have become a nation of wimps. In the old west, people (including children) saw the harsh realities of life and saw people gunned down or publicly hung. The children who saw these things survived the experience without "grief counselors" and lived their lives with a healthy respect for reality. A generation of Americans lived through the Civil War with combat in their towns and farms and human carnage on a scale unimaginable to modern Americans... the kids of that generation lived through seeing it. Modern young people play video games where they eagerly blow other people away and enjoy the gore, and they watch "reality" TV shows... It's actually healthy for them to see some REAL reality. Reality with real consequences. Reality where stupid morons die of their stupidity. Reality where it's not fun or funny to be a jackass.
People who spout "Darwinian principles" always seem to have a really poor notion of how evolution works. If there were any survival value to being "resistant to suicide" than why do we still have people killing themselves? People are more complicated than that.
Often depressive tendenciers are part of complicated, creative personalities that manage to accomplish great things before they have a depressive attack and kill themselves for no good reason. Iris Chang. Jeremey Boorda, Del Shannon, Gary Webb, Kurt Cobain, David Foster Wallace. These people all did stuff that made life better and more interesting for other people. When they offed themselves, a lot of people were pretty damned sorry about it, and with good reason.
And they all lived long enough to have children. So much for "evolution".
Probably the guy on Fox was just having a bad day. (I don't know anything about that episode, and don't want to.) In other words, like most suicides, he was just screwed up. Is just being screwed up bad for your species? Then I guess half the people on Slashdot should probably kill themselves.
.
People who smugly devalue the lives of others are not making a good case for the value of their lives.
Oh jeez, you're one of those 53% idiots. Your tendency to swallow political cliches without any sanity checking does not argue for your intelligence. If we had a eugenics comitttee that allocated the right to reproduce, you'd clearly be on the bottom of the list.
Fortunately, the Nazis made that approach to social engineering unfashionable (pretty much their only positive contribution to evolution), so you're free to reproduce. Which is fine with me, because it's perfectly possible for your children to be smarter than you. Just keep them away from the TV set and find someone to teach them a few critical thinking skills.
Is it compassion to force someone that wants to die to live?
I agree with your indictment of the US prison system, but I wanted to zoom out and try to answer this question in isolation.
I can understand the argument that if the person is a legal adult of sound mind, they are due a certain amount of autonomy over their life. However, people who commit suicide are rarely of sound mind. Decisions made in the heat of the moment are often not what you really want.
IMO, it's compassion to help end the suffering of someone who is terminally ill and in pain and wishes to die. It is also compassion to protect a mentally ill person who is at risk of self-harm from the worst effects of their illness.
Whether this case is closer to the former or the latter, I'll leave to a moral philosopher to judge.
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Nice name. We must be /. siblings.
I used to not think so until a friend of mine did it. The emotional impact was staggering. I was sad, but then I saw how his wife reacted, and I'm still mad at him for doing it. It's been 3+ years, and she still posts on his Facebook page as a way to cope. He did it at work, too, and it really had a major impact on everyone who worked with him. He was well liked, but there was still the normal gossip and jokes. Everyone was ever said anything felt guilty for a long time.
The thing is that everything about it is irrational. The act itself, and the stream of grief and guilt that follows.
I have to also mention that his life insurance policy didn't cover it. His wife had the funeral costs, credit card debt and 100k+ in student loan debt she now has to cover.
It's the most selfish act that a person can do. Even with mental illness to consider (he wasn't diagnosed with anything to my knowledge, but I have to think there were some issues), it's hard to forgive what he did to his wife and family(and he was a friend of mine).
What the Darwin Awards are missing is that the person may have already procreated prior to dying in a spectacular way.
Generally the living regard their status as better than the alternative, so from their point of view, they are entitled to feel superior to those who have offed themselves in obviously stupid ways.
But I do see that the Darwin meme is often an expression of "I haven't been that stupid, yet." It really is not appropriate for anyone under 40 to use it.
Now get off my lawn...
Will
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There are harsh words in parent post. Not really untrue, but very harsh to the delicate ears of slashdotters.
But rather than Darwin awards, the better method of population control is to support the GLBT in their efforts to establish gay marriage rights, and so on. Each gay marriage removes TWO individuals from the reproductive circus. We need much more of that happening.
Will
That is not and never will be true concerning protecting adult people from themselves. In that case, there is no victim. Pretending that there is amounts to treating chronological adults like mental and spiritual infants.
The tacit assumption that society is working on here is that anyone who wants to commit suicide by definition has something wrong with them. Almost of the time, this is even probably true. (Sometimes that's even okay; consider voluntary medical euthanasia, which only makes sense if the patient in question does have something seriously wrong with them.)
There is no "pretending" in the case where someone is mentally ill, or otherwise not in control of themselves. A person in that state is not a fully functioning adult.
Having said that, there's an interesting question as to whether or not it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I'll leave that thought hanging there for now.
Perhaps this is because a compassionate society that cares for its weaker members makes everyone stronger.
[...]
Besides which, if there are no sometimes dire consequences and no bad examples, how do you expect someone to mature into a person who is fully human? You can't do that if you cannot make your own decisions and reap the consequences. No matter how hard you try.
This is not a binary decision. Yes, we need people who learn from their mistakes, which is usually the only way to learn certain lessons. OTOH, nobody would advocate teaching doctors the importance of washing their hands by letting them discover for themselves that not doing so results in dead patients.
To speculate, did you ever think that by the time the chase ended, perhaps this individual preferred death over being pounded in the ass by Bubba for a couple of decades?
All the more reason for society to protect the weak from the strong.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
A lot of people have this perverted sense of compassion that involves sympathy for the Devil himself, so that they may show everyone what a great and noble person they are. The compassion would rightly be for those he endangered. The criminal himself is not a victim.
The problem that a lot of people have with this attitude is that it sounds like you're making excuses why nothing needs fixing. Most people don't turn to crime because they are inherently evil. Most people turn to crime because life dealt them a bad hand.
I'm going to assume that we're not talking about crimes of opportunity and victimless crimes like drug possession or use, and concentrate on the people we really think of as "criminals" and who are accurately defined by that title. These criminals are, generally speaking, either good people for whom crime was the easiest option, or bad people who weren't affluent enough to become CEOs.
Either way, society has to take at least some of the responsibility for creating most criminals.
If things had been even a little different in your life, you could have been this guy. No amount of using distancing language like "Devil", "not a victim", and "rabid dog" changes the fact that there but for the grace of $DEITY go you.
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Yes, the hypocrisy of American broadcast media is never-ending.
Not the broadcast media, our feckless leaders and regulators. Broadcast would love to adopt standards common in the rest of the developed world (a flash of tit or occasional naughty word is OK), but the screaming whack-jobs raise too much of a ruckus. And our representatives cave in.
Have gnu, will travel.
The tacit assumption that society is working on here is that anyone who wants to commit suicide by definition has something wrong with them.
You so very conveniently ignored the final stanza of my post.
We do not know for sure, and that includes you, but I doubt seriously that this man was planning from the start to kill himself. It was a rash decision he made when he found out that most criminals who engage in high-speed chases do get caught and he wasn't going to be the exception. At that moment, it could not be undone, he had two choices and only two choice: get pounded in the ass by Bubba and anyone else who thinks he has a pretty mouth, possibly for decades, or take the suicide route. He chose door number two.
Why would he have even bothered with the chase if he just wanted to die? Think about it. Someone who plans from the start to shoot himself has no reason to run from the cops. I believe that if he had gotten away from them, he would have tried his luck as a fugitive.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Break for a commercial!
Have gnu, will travel.
It's the most selfish act that a person can do.
That's like saying your car was selfish for breaking down while you were driving it.
People who commit suicide are broken. Their brains are broken. Give them a break.
The problem that a lot of people have with this attitude is that it sounds like you're making excuses why nothing needs fixing. Most people don't turn to crime because they are inherently evil. Most people turn to crime because life dealt them a bad hand.
I find people will find or create whatever perception is convenient for them, with "convenient" meaning they do not have to change their perspective. Bonus points if they get to tell someone else how wrong they are, perhaps with condemnatory vitriol.
To say "nothing needs fixing" misses the point. Governments tend to become tyrannical. That's just a fact and has been a repeating pattern throughout history. Does that mean we just give up and submit to tyranny? No. It means we need constant vigilence. Crime is the same way. No, what people want is some kind of simple, easy, painless, one-shot Final Ultimate Perfect Solution that brings Heaven to Earth. They will remain disappointed.
If you want to talk of attitudes that are tiresome, this "life dealt them a bad hand" nonsense is a good start. I have both read about and personally known people who grew up under terrible conditions. Poverty, child abuse, neglect, gang violence, you name it. Some of it frankly makes me want to puke.
The people fitting that description whom I have met also happen to be some of the noblest and most kind-hearted individuals I have ever known. They didn't use their rough life as an excuse to menace and victimize others. They seem to understand that victimizing others just creates more people who will have the upbringing that they had, and they don't wish to perpetuate it.
So we are left, then, with what you seem to find inconvenient. There is at some point a difference between the criminals who had a rough life and think it's okay to create more victims, and those who had horrible upbringings and became wonderful people in spite of everything. What is the difference then? I say it's the nature of the person. Some struggle against the evil that was placed inside of them and lose. Others are victorious. It's a mysterious thing. It doesn't lend itself to the easy answers we always want. Why is that so hard to accept? We have become so arrogant as a society that we think we can scientifically explain every last detail of the universe?
I love logic. Logic works for problems within its domain. This isn't one of them. This requires a more organic understanding, spiritual if you like, though that's a rather loaded word these days, since people think that's something you get from a book, a leader, or pretty much anywhere except inside yourself.
Like I said, sometimes a rabid dog needs to be put down. You can speculate about where rabies originally came from, but you won't find any ultimate answers.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The "life" of the guy that shot himself in the video was worth less than most, according to both him and most of the rest of the world. I know it's polite to argue otherwise, but it's the only rational observation.
Time and again it happens that people quickly abandon rationality the moment it doesn't say what they want it to say.
This is especially true for any sort of "what would other people think of me if I were truly honest about this?" type of issues. Because to most, what other people would think and winning their petty approval of who you are is far, FAR more important than rationality, than making sense.
The real irony is that if their opinion were worth a damn, if they were any kind of person worth taking seriously, they would respect your opinion whether or not they agreed with it and approval would be removed from the equation. But such people, which I call actual adults, are quite rare.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
So you see then the hyper-emotional, irrational style of "argumentation" from what are nowadays average people. That one was merely their de facto representative.
The way average people think is entirely at the mercy of what they like and dislike. He didn't personally like what you said, therefore in his mind, you must be objectively wrong. It follows (in twisted, perverted emotional "logic") that anything he says against you must therefore be in accordance with rational thinking.
You might not believe it, but deep down, if you dig deeply enough, it's a roundabout way of declaring oneself a sort of "god", and you definitely don't blaspheme "god" or you suffer "god's wrath" (usually some kind of belittling or degrading tone). It is dressed up in the language of pseudo-rationalism of course. The giveaway is that it's full of personal attacks instead of an explanation for why your position is faulty.
Most of the human race operates this way. It's why nothing ever really changes, even when it does. Oh and the killing of a bunch of brown people who aren't really a threat to us, that's "legitimized" because a "bigger god" in the form of government has approved it. Put the right symbol behind something and lots of emotional thinkers will get behind it. Advertisers exploit this every day. The hilarious thing is that people who do not understand this will whine about "yeah well it works even MORE on YOU since you are daring to criticize it!" yeah well manipulation tends not to work so well when you know that you are being manipulated, you know who is doing it, and you know what they want to gain from doing so. But of course they're "god" and I am not, so what do I know...
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
No; defenses of free speech in this thread haven't gone too far. Same rule applies. If a violent act occurs because of speech, a nonviolent act, then all blame goes to the person doing the violent act. No idea is so evil or virulent it can't be communicated. Only actions.
People advocating censorship are as evil as people advocating racism.
I haven't watched any Babylon 5... so I'm curious. Did Captain Sheridan die, or did his risky plan work?
People who smugly devalue the lives of others are not making a good case for the value of their lives.
So you speak of people who peacefully post opinions on a Web site as equals to people who steal cars, wave guns around, lead police on dangerous chases, and finally off themselves when they realize arrest is otherwise unavoidable?
Is this more of that "oh no, all lifestyles are perfectly 100% equal, just different" garbage? I guess the average mass murderer is really just misunderstood?
What you devalue is the fact that this man had choices to make and he chose poorly. You act like that just "happened", as if he had nothing to do with it. It's a war against individuality and you have apparently chosen the wrong side.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
This is true, but they've noticed correlations between different ways that suicide is discussed and the suicide rate following it.
Sometimes I think that the ability to collect detailed statistics about social issues is one of the worst things that ever happened to society.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
No, it's not "human". It's "polite", under Western standards.
To speculate, did you ever think that by the time the chase ended, perhaps this individual preferred death over being pounded in the ass by Bubba for a couple of decades? Maybe you would have chosen Bubba, but you must admit someone else might not.
You make some interesting points, but this "prison rape is part of the punishment" meme is particularly worrisome. First, there is the tacit assumption that prison rape is common, or at least significantly more common than base-rate rape. If true, we are not designing our prisons and guard procedures responsibly.
Next, and perhaps more disturbing, is the idea that this is ok, and even expected. After all, everyone in prison is a subhuman criminal and therefore deserves any treatment they get no matter how terrible, right?
This idea is so ingrained that it's even made light of in comedy movies (Office Space, for one..)
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
So you speak of people who peacefully post opinions on a Web site as equals to people who steal cars, wave guns around, lead police on dangerous chases, and finally off themselves when they realize arrest is otherwise unavoidable?
Well, yes, actually. Because (and this is the part you're not paying attention to), I'm arguing against people devaluing the lives of other people.
Is this more of that "oh no, all lifestyles are perfectly 100% equal, just different" garbage?
No, I don 't think becoming, say, a murderer, is just a "lifestyle choice". I might even concede that society has the right to punish the murderer extremely and permanently.
But that's punishing the murderer for what he does not for what he is. You can't control what people are. Societies that try are commonly known as totalitarian. I assume we're both against that?
Anyway, it's a long way from saying, "A murderer deserves to die", to "a suicide is a loser who has done society a favor". Punishing murderers is about society protecting itself from dangerous people. Discounting the lives of suicides is ignorant, stupid, and expressive of a smug sense of superiority.
You can see this 5 second delay on the in-studio monitors in effect because after the live viewer sees the suicide, it cuts to the anchorman who we can see watching it 5 seconds later.
Too bad I'm responding to an AC, but you are the definition of 'POP'.
'POP' in music is a genre, the definition of which is mostly controlled by those beholden to the industry distributors, rolling stoned, and the paid reviewers.
Other then that it is the first three letters of popular and the first three letters of my favourite kind of corn.
No brain, no pain.
No sure what planet you live on, but on mine, GLBT people have and raise children. (Hint fertilisation of an egg doesn't require a man and a woman to share a sexual encounter). From your somewhat weird point of view, you may be interested to know that children raised by parents who are homosexual, are less likely to be homosexual themselves. If you see that as a problem, you should probably take all of the children away from the hetero parents.
The thing is that everything about it is irrational.
I don't see anything inherently illogical about it. It's a choice just like anything else.
It's the most selfish act that a person can do.
But wanting them to stay alive for you and/or others isn't? I say there's nothing wrong with selfishness in some cases. Don't let other people's sensitivity/emotions control your every action.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Yeah, that was an awful mistake. Look at these tragic viewing figures and all this devastating publicity.
It has nothing to do with intelligence. You know nothing about Suicide, so pretending you do is especially offensive. Calling someone stupid because they killed themselves is patently absurd.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
> Nolan called his site's decision to post the video 'ethical,'
> because 'it is news' but research suggests that graphic
> depictions of suicide in the media can spur copycat
> suicides, especially among young people, and the World
> Health Organization's guidelines warn against
> sensationalizing it.
But nothing.... there is no contradiction between those statements. There is nothing unethical about showing people an incident that happened in public, particularly when its news.
Nothing about WHO guidelines or what other people choose to do has any ethical bearing, no matter how much emotional reaction it makes you have. A copycat suicide is 100% on the shoulders of the person who does it, not the person who showed them what they are copying.
Nobody else bears a shred of responsibility.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
It's a choice that is generally significantly biased by an underlying mental illness. When you aren't in a rational state, you can't properly evaluate the consequences of that action.
I wanted him to stay alive because I cared about him. He needed help. I highlighted the aftermath so that others could see the aftermath, which is rarely considered or talked about.
It is the most selfish decision a person can make. However, they're usually not in the position to properly evaluate the consequences.
Ad hominem and Godwin in one.
You lose! Good day sir!
It's a choice that is generally significantly biased by an underlying mental illness.
Regardless of what mental illnesses we diagnose these people with, I see nothing inherently illogical about it. No more so than simply doing what you want to do (even if they can't evaluate the consequences, but for some people, that may not be true).
It is the most selfish decision a person can make.
Who decided that it is the "most" selfish? Almost everything humans do is selfish, anyway.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Good lord. You have an entire argument about inferior certain people are, and when I point out how your arguments bounce back on you, I'm the one being ad hominem?
If you parse my post a little more carefully, you'll notice I wasn't calling you a Nazi.. I was citing the Nazi's ironically. Subtle concept, I agree, but I'm sure you can grasp if if you concentrate.
How long before executions are shown live?
It will be pay-per-view. This was just to test the waters, and there was less outcry than a "trouser malfunction", which leads to there being less outcry for pay-per-view executions vs pay-per-view porn.
That people are making all sorts of justifications for copying and posting the vid everywhere.
I feel sad at the thought of the guys friends, relatives, kids seeing it.
I thought about how his grandparents would feel, should they see it.
I think that people have lost their humanity, that they are losing empathy, that they are becoming increasingly selfish, and losing their ability to see cause and effect.
Does anybody really give a shit anymore ?
Smart people do stupid things. You are stupidly confusing a stupid act with a stupid person. You must be stupid.
Learn to love Alaska
They aren't missing anything. They've just taken into account the roughly 50% chance that any offspring will have the retarded gene.
What's more: http://www.darwinawards.com/rules/rules1.html
"Removing ones genes from the pool clearly has less merit if the genes have already been passed on to several offspring, unless you can rely on the offspring to also find creative ways of eliminating their genes before they reproduce. Thus, a weighting factor should be applied to the criteria, giving maximum benefit to a victim who has never procreated, decreasing as the number of offspring increases."
In short, don't believe everything your pastor tells you, fatty.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That seems hard to believe, since teens have a higher suicide rate than average. Got any sources on that?
Learn to love Alaska
Yes: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6128a8.htm?s_cid=mm6128a8_w
Dilbert RSS feed
Regardless of whether or not you see the big 3 tv news channels as news or entertainment, not airing something because people might do rash things isn't really a good reason for not showing it. If DC's cops went on strike (if that's even possible, like in robocop) then I am sure the minute that that news is disseminated, and crime would increase; however, that is not a good justification for not sharing that news.
Whereas your tiredness of it is evidence of intelligence, moral character, and a massive cock.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Again, you don't have the slightest understanding of suicide, so STFU. Furthermore, you specifically claimed that it supports darwinism by removing stupid people from the gene pool, so you sound especially stupid trying to claim that you were not saying the people were stupid for doing it. Claiming that most suicides are done pre-procreation was just the icing on the cake of your ignorance and stupidity. Go back and read what you wrote and then your last reply so you can finally understand why everyone keeps calling you an ignorant idiot all the time.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Again, you don't have the slightest understanding of suicide, so STFU.
I have a degree in psychology. What's your training?
Furthermore, you specifically claimed that it supports darwinism by removing stupid people from the gene pool, so you sound especially stupid trying to claim that you were not saying the people were stupid for doing it.
I think you are working really hard to find things to complain about. I never said that the people removed from the gene pool are stupid. I said it is a stupid act, and removes the people who did it from the gene pool.
Claiming that most suicides are done pre-procreation was just the icing on the cake of your ignorance and stupidity.
Really? Well, not a single person has posted something that directly contradicts it. What percentage of suicides leave surviving progeny? I've seen and had quoted to me statistics about age, but none are collected, as far as I can tell, about whether they had children.
Go back and read what you wrote and then your last reply so you can finally understand why everyone keeps calling you an ignorant idiot all the time.
Nobody has called me an ignorant idiot in this thread, let alone do so on any regular basis. And I stand by what I said. Killing yourself is a stupid act. Killing yourself when you don't have children removes you from the gene pool. Thus, that does qualify every suicide for a darwin award, even if not the "official" one.
Learn to love Alaska
More middle aged suicides than make it in the press, where I guess every teen suicide makes the news, and none of the others, unless caught on camera, or a woman murder-suiciding her children. So the next question is what percentage of each has children? There's nothing that says an 18 year old is necessarily childless and an 80 year old has one or more...
Learn to love Alaska
I can spot a lying idiot from the other end of an Internet connection.
So you concede that you were talking out your paper asshole when you made the statement. At least we agree on something now.
I guess you cannot read, since I called you exactly that in this thread. Furthermore, I guarantee you plenty of people call you that all of the time.
And for the win, the proof that you are not a qualified psychologist, and that you now contradict yourself and once again, re-assert that the person is stupid for killing themselves after saying you didn't say so and calling me stupid.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Gee, what can I say? I failed to state that to 5 significant figures, the number of potential parents removed from the reproductive circus in every committed gay or lesbian relationship is 2.0000 Does that now make you happy?
Also, 97.8% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Silly rabbit. Get off of my lawn.
Will
I can spot a lying idiot from the other end of an Internet connection.
Well, like so many other things, you are wrong. However, there is no way to prove it, is there? Should I email you a photo of me next to my psychology degree? But then, I expect it wouldn't change your mind about anything, so not worth my time. You are wrong on every count and don't even bother to read what I wrote.
Killing yourself is a stupid act.
And for the win, the proof that you are not a qualified psychologist, and that you now contradict yourself and once again, re-assert that the person is stupid for killing themselves after saying you didn't say so and calling me stupid.
You are failing to differentiate between a stupid act and a stupid person. Further, it contradicts nothing I've previously said. And I fail to see how it proves I'm not a qualified psychologist. "Stupid" is not a technical term, and most psychologists are against suicide, and such a decision is to be frowned upon, and many people express such disapproval with negative words, such as "stupid". Thus, I would argue that saying suicide is "stupid" is consistent with psychological tenets.
Of course, what you say to some jackass on the Internet who calls you a liar for telling the unpleasant truth is different than what one says in a clinical envoronement. Here, put this one through your BS meter
When I was in high school, before any psychology degree (or a BS in BS, as I like to call it), there was gentleman named Andy was well known to have psychological problems, having been in and out of school for various reasons. One day, he walked up to me and asked me to help him kill himself. He expressed that he was interested in doing so in a manner that didn't look like a suicide so that his family could collect the insurance. As we were on the 3rd floor, near a window, I offered the suggestion that a fall from the 3rd story would likely be fatal, especially if one landed on the sidewalk, and told him that we'd have to come up with a plan to make such a fall look like an accident and not a deliberate jump. He agreed it seemed plausible, and we parted to go to class. I kept a little of an eye on him as he went to his class, and mine was the other way. I walked straight into the principals office and sat down. I told the principal, "Andy just asked me to help him kill himself." As a general smartass, I had a reputation as such. She asked, "Are you serious." I said "Yes." She said, "Thank you, I'll take care of it." I went to class. I told nobody else what happened. He wasn't in class the next day, or the next 6 weeks after. When he did return, I was worried he'd be mad at me, but he approached me after he was back in school to thank me.
So, BS, or not BS? I made sure to add in sufficient adjectives and such to make it seem plausible. I've heard that if you make someone see the scene in their head, they'll consider it true, even if false. Just to make sure it wasn't too easy for you.
Learn to love Alaska
You make some interesting points, but this "prison rape is part of the punishment" meme is particularly worrisome. First, there is the tacit assumption that prison rape is common, or at least significantly more common than base-rate rape. If true, we are not designing our prisons and guard procedures responsibly.
I think it's fucked up and I think that prison administrators who don't do everything possible to discourage it, prevent it, and severely punish anyone who does it are just plain evil.
However, it certainly does happen. Think about it. An inmate is locked in a confined environment with a bunch of people who have already demonstrated lawless and/or violent tendencies, some of whom may be in prison in the first place for raping someone, with little else to do all day except pump iron and establish what are basically sub-groups or gangs with a hierarchical structure. In a place with no women.
Next, and perhaps more disturbing, is the idea that this is ok, and even expected. After all, everyone in prison is a subhuman criminal and therefore deserves any treatment they get no matter how terrible, right?
I hope this never, ever happens, but if you yourself were facing a long prison sentence, are you telling me the possibility of being someone's bitch would never cross your mind? Prison is a dog-eat-dog environment full of aggressive people. It is not an environment where you can keep to yourself, mind your own business, and be left alone. Hell, that's quite difficult to do in regular society because so many people have no life of their own, are meddlesome and self-important, and must insert themselves into every little trivial situation.
This idea is so ingrained that it's even made light of in comedy movies (Office Space, for one..)
If this stereotype were completely 100% baseless and entirely the product of someone's imagination, it would be one of the few I've ever heard of.
At any rate, if you read my previous post and thought I approved of this, you grossly misunderstood what I said. I deliberately made no comment about it one way or the other, except to mention that someone who has already shown he makes rash decisions might have also considered it. Furthermore, I am not one of the mindless sheeple who repeats a meme with no concept of where it came from. The fact that this is ingrained only reinforces the point I was making.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Same reason why Sparta was at some point.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
So you speak of people who peacefully post opinions on a Web site as equals to people who steal cars, wave guns around, lead police on dangerous chases, and finally off themselves when they realize arrest is otherwise unavoidable?
Well, yes, actually. Because (and this is the part you're not paying attention to), I'm arguing against people devaluing the lives of other people.
This man devalued his own life. In exactly the opposite way that people who truly respect themselves don't allow themselves to become obese.
But if either of those standards are failed, then there comes the need for excuses.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
But that's punishing the murderer for what he does not for what he is. You can't control what people are.
No, *I* cannot. I can only control what I am. A murderer likewise chose to be what he is.
Societies that try are commonly known as totalitarian [wikipedia.org]. I assume we're both against that?
Yes, we are. Those societies spiral out of control because what they're trying to do is not actually possible.
Anyway, it's a long way from saying, "A murderer deserves to die", to "a suicide is a loser who has done society a favor". Punishing murderers is about society protecting itself from dangerous people. Discounting the lives of suicides is ignorant, stupid, and expressive of a smug sense of superiority.
This is why context must be considered. Someone who murders five people and then turns the gun on himself is indeed doing us all a favor. There is nothing smug about it. The rest of us are better off without him.
This man who off'ed himself merely endangered others. His suicide was just a completely selfish act because he preferred death over facing his crimes. No one forced him to take what he perceived as the easy way out. He willingly chose it. He discounted his own life and nothing you or I may say is going to change that fact.
The real smug sense of superiority is to believe that holding a particular opinion changes one bit the reality of the situation. It's also rather smug to assume that I value my particular opinion about the man's life and what it is worth more than the opinion of the man himself. It was his call to make. I would have told him to face his punishment like someone with a spine and try to turn his life around, but he didn't ask me.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I have no idea who you're taking about. Nor am I making excuses for anybody. I'm simply attacking the smug assumption that people give in to depression and kill themselves are simply inferior life forms who deserve to die.
I'm not a Christian, but Mathew 7:1 seems appropriate.
Well, speaking of context, how about paying attention to the context I was actually talking about?
Did we all forget the TV counterpart to the "first post"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Budd_Dwyer 30th Treasurer of Pennsylvania R. Budd Dwyer. Lucky for me I was in school at the time and even luckier I got to see it live because of a day off of school from snow.
I don't know how you could possibly confuse me with you, but you pulled it off.
Even you aren't such a moron as to do that while simultaneously believing you are trying to help him. Ergo, either you did say that, or you didn't try to help him. The entire story might be made up, or any subpart may be made up, but the whole story cannot possibly be true. It has nothing to do with psychology.
You failed miserably in your goal.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The music industry, in attempting to sell the world "the next nirvana" was what ruined POP MUSIC during the 90's. If that's all you listened to, that's your fault. Kurt Cobain was an artist in the truest sense of the word, caring about nothing other than creating what he saw as art.
Except that one of the sources of his depression was that he would be seen as a thief who stole other people's music. There was at least one lawsuit pending when he suicided. That's not a "true artist." It seems that people that vote you up are not able to differentiate the talent of a band that made a few good albums, and the one member who was all angsty and garnered all kinds of attention.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
If you want to talk of attitudes that are tiresome, this "life dealt them a bad hand" nonsense is a good start. I have both read about and personally known people who grew up under terrible conditions. Poverty, child abuse, neglect, gang violence, you name it. Some of it frankly makes me want to puke.
I know people from that kind of situation too. However, I don't know about you, but my acquaintances are a highly biassed sample. I generally don't mix with habitual armed robbers. Pretty much everyone I consider a friend is kind hearted, and that includes the ones which had shitty upbringings.
Having said that, many of them are, while not necessarily criminal, still not very well-adjusted, and still have unresolved or partly-resolved problems which have the effect of sometimes hurting other people, even if they intend otherwise. PTSD often breaks up relationships, for example, if the other party isn't wise to it. (I've been the other party. No, I will not elaborate.)
I can easily see how some of this could spill over into criminality if not checked. There are many anti-social methods which people use to keep some psychological semblance of control of a life which is perceived to be out of control. That's one of the key reasons why some people develop eating disorders (to keep control over what people put into their mouths), but it's also one of the key reasons why some people become abusive partners (to control someone else).
So we are left, then, with what you seem to find inconvenient. There is at some point a difference between the criminals who had a rough life and think it's okay to create more victims, and those who had horrible upbringings and became wonderful people in spite of everything. What is the difference then? I say it's the nature of the person. Some struggle against the evil that was placed inside of them and lose. Others are victorious. It's a mysterious thing.
Or, to put it another way, it's the luck of the draw. That is, life dealt you a bad hand.
It's interesting that you said "the nature of the person", where I'm concentrating on nurture. What I actually find the most inconvenient is that there is, when you get down to it, no good evidence to call this one either way. The character of a person is undoubtedy a product of both nature and nurture. At the moment, we don't know of exactly where the boundary between the two lies, and it would be highly unethical to find out experimentally.
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You so very conveniently ignored the final stanza of my post.
You're right. I'd already addressed that point elsewhere in the thread, and so skimmed over it here. I probably shouldn't have done that.
However, I don't think this changes anything I said. I don't think he set out planning to kill himself, and I didn't even imply that I thought that. I think that decision was made (as I put it) "in the heat of the moment". I doubt there was very much rational weighing up of costs and benefits going on at all.
Having said that, the issue of sexual assault in prisons is an important one. It's literally a joke to many people; in fact, it's one of the few types of "rape joke" that's still socially acceptable. No legislator wants to talk about it lest they be seen as "soft on crime" in a society based around retribution rather than justice. Hell, police in the US will actually use it as a threat!
If you're right about this guy, fixing that problem would have resulted in not only less sexual assault in the world, but also fewer innocent people's lives being endangered and one less suicide here. How is that not win-win?
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What I don't understand is how people can rationalise prison rape as an acceptable part of the punishment, yet not be concerned that the rapist and the victim will be let back into society after their terms are served, and expect them to be well adjusted, upright citizens.
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
Governments tend to become tyrannical. That's just a fact and has been a repeating pattern throughout history. Does that mean we just give up and submit to tyranny? No. It means we need constant vigilence.
Government elected by people who believe governments are evil, become evil. It's people like you who are the problem, no, the disease. Of all possible things, this is a discussion about suicide, and it just happens that the best thing you can do for everyone else is to kill yourself.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
That's the real story here. Not that he committed suicide, but that he'd rather die than get caught (again?). Every law we have and every rule we enforce is about being a deterrant to going to jail. When death is more attractive than jail, laws no longer mean anything.
You really think he was making a rational informed decision?
I stole this Sig
They should be rare because prison should be a controlled environment and we should be taking pains to make sure that the opportunities simply do not exist. It should be extremely difficult to commit additional crimes while in prison. Especially particularly heinous crimes.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Governments tend to become tyrannical. That's just a fact and has been a repeating pattern throughout history. Does that mean we just give up and submit to tyranny? No. It means we need constant vigilence.
Government elected by people who believe governments are evil, become evil. It's people like you who are the problem, no, the disease. Of all possible things, this is a discussion about suicide, and it just happens that the best thing you can do for everyone else is to kill yourself.
As the Founding Fathers observed and wrote about more articulately than I am likely to, and as any decent history book will demonstrate, governments tend to start out with some of the noblest of intentions and then, like all other non-permanent things in this Universe, they start to decay and fail. The failure mode of government is to become increasingly tyrannical and authoritarian, until finally they either collapse under their own weight or are overthrown. The best guard against this is to have limited government which recognized as fundamental various human rights, to give people the ability to participate in said government, and to have as much as possible come from local levels.
Your hatred and vitriol is not really against me, for I have done you no harm. I merely speak the truth concerning the reality of human affairs that you seem desperate to deny. You are merely descending into the realm of "shoot the messenger, that will make the facts go away". No, it won't. My personal death isn't going to stop the USA from becoming increasingly authoritarian, for example. Your great faith in the goodness of government isn't going to stop it either. Large numbers of people standing up and demanding that it stick to its founding principles is the only thing that will do that.
I know it's increasingly trendy on Internet forums to tell other people to die, to kill themselves, etc. You probably think that makes you sound intense and edgy and badass. No, it makes you sound like a pathetic, weak little shell of a man who has no real argument, just a lot of anger and a desperately insecure need to blame it on someone else. I don't hope that you come to any harm at all. I hope that you prosper and come to see your current condition as beneath you, or at the very least, that you mature enough to recognize as unhealthy your hatred of those who have done no harm.
That's the difference between you and I.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Having said that, the issue of sexual assault in prisons is an important one. It's literally a joke to many people; in fact, it's one of the few types of "rape joke" that's still socially acceptable.
I have a rather expansive sense of humor. In a non-serious context many completely tasteless jokes could be funny, particularly with alcohol involved. But in a serious context, actual rape of actual human beings is not remotely funny. It's demoralizing that so many people think it is.
No legislator wants to talk about it lest they be seen as "soft on crime" in a society based around retribution rather than justice.
You especially see this "soft on crime" bullshit when it comes to non-violent drug offenders who have not victimized anyone. Making the punishment actually fit the crime, or even admitting that sometimes the law invents crimes where no real crime has happened (that is, there is no victim) is what you would expect from a competent and responsible legislator. We generally don't have those. We have approval whores who will pander to anyone if they think it will get them elected. I'm not sure they even have their own beliefs, principles, and convictions. If they do, they certainly don't have the backbone to stand up for them.
Hell, police in the US will actually use it as a threat!
I know that particularly after 9/11 it has become fashionable to glorify police and celebrate their great "heroics". This is sometimes legitimate, but I deal in facts. Police themselves are often violent people. They certainly like to be in control. The kind of power they have is most appealing to sociopaths and fevered egos. You could say it's irresistable. Sociopaths are notorious for their ability to blend in with normal people by saying or doing anything in order to be seen as virtuous.
I have personally met both police officers and firefighters. It's much easier for me to respect someone like a firefighter because their job doesn't provide so many reasons to push people around and act like a tough guy, and I would not hesitate to point out that anyone willing to run into a burning building has some serious balls. It's no surprise to me that police would say or do just about anything they can get away with (which is a lot more than you or I could get away with) if they really want to make someone comply. It seems they can blatantly break the law and inflict violence with the loss of their job being the most severe consequence they are likely to ever face.
If you're right about this guy, fixing that problem would have resulted in not only less sexual assault in the world, but also fewer innocent people's lives being endangered and one less suicide here. How is that not win-win?
In the case of someone who is sent to prison in the first place for having raped someone, I really don't have a lot of sympathy for them having to find out just how unpleasant it is to be the victim. But if we are going to consider that a "feature" and not a "bug", then make it part of the official sentence. That would, of course, be both barbaric and crazy. At least it would also be honest. This "turning a blind eye" bullshit has to stop though. I don't care what the prisoner did to get there, we as a society have to be better than those we condemn. Otherwise, on what basis do we condemn them?
I don't know for sure that prison rape is why he would have rather killed himself, but I strongly suspect it ran through his mind. Plenty of bullying and beatings and things of that nature, short of rape, do go on in a confined environment full of violent people such as a prison.
The picture you paint is certainly a win-win. This guy could have served his time, maybe learned a trade or job skill, and tried to turn his life back around. The stigma of a criminal record would be difficult to overcome. Mainstream America generally doesn't admit that people can chang
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Your "Founding Fathers" had no experience with any form of government except Monarchy. Their perspective is hopelessly outdated and limited, and it takes either an enormous idiot or intellectually dishonest person to treat their writings as anything but historical curiosities.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Your "Founding Fathers" had no experience with any form of government except Monarchy. Their perspective is hopelessly outdated and limited, and it takes either an enormous idiot or intellectually dishonest person to treat their writings as anything but historical curiosities.
When the USA descends into tyranny please act surprised, will you? I couldn't tell you how much I would like to be wrong about this, but all the signs are there.
... so I can't show him that much decency, I mean if I did that I would lose ten points" that's about how the thinking goes. It's some kind of puerile emotional "logic" designed to protect ego. It's also a path to misery. I would feel like a prisoner within my own life if I couldn't overcome that. Enjoy whatever smug superiority you can convince yourself of.
And I like how you just gloss over what I had to say about wishing death to people you've never met and know nothing about. I suppose you couldn't comment on that, after all you might lose face if you gave any sort of honest answer. At least, to someone who would say such a thing, a statement like "hmm you know I shouldn't have said that, I was out of line" would equate to losing face. To me, it would equate to being man enough to take responsibility for your own actions and would only increase my respect for that person.
"But but I don't like that guy, personally I hate him, I mean after all he expressed an opinion I disagree with
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
When the USA descends into tyranny please act surprised, will you?
USA is a tyranny, and always was -- except, of course, businesses are higher than the government in its hierarchy. This happens precisely because of people like you, and there is no hope to change it to anything else.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
If there were any survival value to being "resistant to suicide" than why do we still have people killing themselves?
It's because the rate of suicide is low enough to be carried by the gene pool--it's not high enough to threaten the population as a whole. Yes, evolution does stipulate that that life be able to survive somehow--suicide is no exception to this rule. All I'm saying is that evolutionary theory gives us an actual reason to believe that mass suicide will not happen. I mean, sure there are always some people killing themselves, but I think the notion of copycat suicides going epidemic because of online videos is a load of nonsense and is contrary to what we know about biology.
Personally I think you're over-philosophizing this.
It's because the rate of suicide is low enough to be carried by the gene pool--it's not high enough to threaten the population as a whole.
Dude, evolution is something that happens to the populatin as a whole. If suicide doesn't have any effect on the gene pool, then there's no evolution going on.
Personally I think you're over-philosophizing this.
I'm not philosophizing at all. I'm pointing out your poor understanding of how evolution works.
You do realize that you're failing to disagree with me, right? I said that the rate of suicide is low enough to be carried by the gene pool, and your following statement "if it doesn't have any effect on the gene pool, there is no evolution going on" doesn't contradict my statement. Death in any form affects a gene pool, be it slight or immeasurable; populations in which a small percentage die from a particular disease may develop immunity to the disease... not because the disease was going to wipe out the population, but the individuals in the population which more successfully resisted the disease were overall healthier and produced more offspring, thus affecting the gene pool. Individuals that have a strong tendency toward suicide edge themselves out of the gene pool, whereas those whose genome make them more resistant to suicide have a better chance at propagating their genes. This process happens over several generations. Evolution functions in a way that mitigates suicide, which is my original statement and I stand by it. Yes, suicide, still happens--it's just limited, but you are apparently the one who has no grasp of evolution to insist that it's an all-or-nothing situation (either everyone must commit suicide or nobody).
Now let's say for some reason suicide increases the chance of reproduction. For example, spiders who get eaten after mating--to reproduce means to die, but then they have a better chance at having offspring. Because it helps in successful reproduction, evolution has made this behavior common and ubiquitous among the species (in this species nearly all males get eaten after mating). Among human beings, the rate of suicide is actually very low--we're talking a fraction of a percent. Why isn't it more common? Why not 10%? 50%? 80%? Evolution. Learn how it works.
Actually I think there's more to this than you think - I suspect most suicides are probably the result of someone being treated like shit by some asshole for years. And actually, if you think about it, it is precisely the suicide victim who deserves to live, and precisely the tormentor who deserves to die.
Smugly and derisively pointing out suicide is a form of Darwinism is something you would only hear from the type of person who treats others like shit.
Fox's news is about excitement and outrage not information. I don't see any reason a live chase should be on a news channel while it is ongoing. I mean people die in gruesome ways from high speed car crashes, if you put enough on live TV you will see blood.