I don’t. I really don’t need to see someone get beheaded or burned alive to know how brutal and inhumane it is. Plus, ISIS/AL Qaeda wants us to see it and be horrified, so I won’t give them that. I wouldn’t watch anyway if that were not a factor.
I was in high school when the “Faces of Death” videos were around. Someone brought one to a party I was at and all the guys went downstairs to watch. Except me. I stayed upstairs with all the girls. After ten minutes, a slow but steady stream of green faced guys began to come up. They said they wished they could unsee what they had just watched. Of course, some guys were giddy at the end (or pretended to be.)
I really don’t care what other people enjoy, but I’m curious how this falls out.
I don’t watch them alone or go looking for them, per se…but I have frequented sites like the YNC, nothingtoxic, liveleak, rotten, and ogrish before.
I don’t think Ogrish and NothingToxic are up anymore, and the YNC changed a lot in the regards that you have to have a premium account to see anything really hardcore.
It’s kind of like being unable to turn away from an accident. curiosity leads you there and then you click around, exploring a bit. That’s how it is with me, anyway.
But those sites aren’t just death/murder/torture vids, there’s a wide range of stuff, including things like just regular fights and brawls that happened.
Interestingly, I have no problem watching drone strikes taken from the air, or seeing the Twin Towers fall, even though I know many people are dying at the time. I can even watch the people jumping out of the Towers on 9/11, but they just disappear behind a building, you don’t see them hit ground. I would never watch that.
Not that I search these out, but I see them on 9/11 documentaries and it doesn’t bother me too much.
I went “once or twice” but the actual case is I haven’t watched any of the videos – just seen a fair amount of it on the news and in footage from the various wars.
Nah. I’ll watch stuff in films or whatever where it’s part of the story and all Hollywood for entertainment’s sake but the real terrorist videos or animal cruelty videos? I figure there’s nothing enriching or better that I’m going to take from that. Hell, I’ve largely trained myself out of even reading the outrage porn news stories about how some mother cooked her kid in the car or some toddler was beaten. Reading those doesn’t make me a better person, it just makes me feel sick for the sake of feeling sick.
Just to add, I can’t even watch the Youtube videos of skateboarders slamming theit crotch into a railing, or people jumping from houses and missing pools or trampolines, for example.
Car crashes are somewhat OK, because I can’t actually see the people in the car.
Hell, no. To be honest, since my parents are Holocaust survivors whenever I see any death, torture etc scenes in fictional movies I personalize and immediately visualize family who were tortured, murdered and horribly mistreated. I can’t imagine seeing it for real.
This exactly. This was back when things like that would get posted without sufficient warning, and while I managed to turn it off before it was finished, that was more than enough.
I’ve stumbled on to these unintentionally…or when some joker links to one without proper labeling… Grr…
(The same way I was exposed to Goatce or my first Wingerdoodle… The difference being that I actually kind of like Wingerdoodles…)
Ultimately, I find it terribly disturbing, and it knocks me off my psychological kilter for some time. I’m VERY glad that the SDMB has rules against “gotcha” links.
Responded to the poll before I read the OP. I said “once or twice” meaning if there’s a documentary about some real tragedy, I’ll force myself to watch any graphic bits, because I feel like it’s important to do so.
But watching something really violent for its own sake, for entertainment / curiosity? Hell no.