I’m at work. We are allowed to use their Internet access, it’s a T-1 line. The agreement, hinted at but not really formalized is that we won’t ever use it for anything out of line, no downloads, etc. Our access is in no way filtered, however.
A few hours ago, the guy sitting next to me asked who wanted to watch the video of the man from West Chester, PA. who was beheaded last week in Iraq. As the video started to play a foot from me and I heard the man reading the written paper he’d read from, I got up and left.
Overpoweringly sickening, the idea of even thinking of watching the videotape. I see nothing educational or enlightening. Anyone who wishes to read the text of the paper read by that man can find the words online.
I am so distressed by this. The fact that someone put it onto the Internet somehow makes it okay to view? Nothing is sacred, not death, not humiliation, nothing.
And no, I don’t want the world to put it’s head in the sand or live in denial. But this piece of videotape? It is nothing but prurient gore. I am beyond disgusted.
Some people just have morbid curiosity. Some people like to have the powerful imagery to fuel their passions (despite their political leanings).
I mean, c’mon… Rotten.com and the Stile Project have existed for years. I think the Internet has proven that there aren’t any lines that won’t be crossed.
I say just stare at the Goatse guy for half an hour and that’ll probably have the same effect.
It’s not just you. I wouldn’t want to watch it either. A while ago our company temporarilly employed someone who would openly visit sites of disgusting imagery.
I feel the same way. I don’t want to see the “interrogation” photos and I absolutely don’t want to see the beheading. The very idea sickens me. I can’t imagine how the man’s family feels, knowing it’s out there being replayed for entertainment.
You can’t. They’ve pervaded your consciousness forever, short of brain damage. HOWEVER, you can dilute them by flooding your brain with tons and tons of filthy, horrible, disgusting, depraved, sick, twisted imagery. There’s stuff out there that makes Goatse look like Leave it to Beaver.
Well, I thought that one of the main ideas/principles behind the Internet was that there weren’t any limits, that there was no such thing as censorship or banned forms of expression.
I will admit to having visited Rotten.com and the Stileproject occasionally, but that was a decision I made of my own free will. No one forced me to go there, I went there because i was curious.
I must admit to having a bit of morbid curiosity myself, but seeing an actual video of an incident like that - compared to just photos (which can be terrible disturbing themselves) - is too much. I regret having seen the video of that city official somewhere in the States who shot himself at a live news conference. (He had just been convicted of some sort of corruption.) The people who can’t get enough of seeing this kind of stuff scare me. I’d question their ability to clearly distinguish reality from fiction, and be fearful for their mental health (and, subsequently, the safety of others).
My new employers also don’t filter our internet usage, except that they have three rules: (1) no downloading anything without permission, (2) no reading personal email on work computers, at all, ever, and (3) sites visited must be “business appropriate.”
I’d say the video of the beheading probably violates rule #3, big time.
Have you considered mentioning to your superiors that they at least urge people to exercise a little taste and discretion in their workplace usage, even if they don’t snoop into the sites you and your coworkers visit? Because if my coworker started playing that video at work, I’d be in the boss’s office in about a half a heartbeat making my views known on such things being played at work, in view and hearing of fellow employees, in particular ME.
I have not seen the video and I don’t plan to do so.
I agree that watching it for entertainment is extremely sick.
However I think that you can’t rule out the possibility of legitimate interest completely.
Is this really so much different from all the other images we have seen?
We all have seen war documentaries, some impersonal like fighter planes shot down and crashing, bombings from high altitude, ships sinking or tank burning, some very personal and intense like people being shot or burned with flame throwers. I have seen countless hours of concentration camp documentation (ok, by far most of it post-liberation) and reports of other nazi crimes like Russian civillians dangling from lamp posts. I presume that we all have seen Kennedy’s brain spray his limousine hundreds of times. Do you think that seeing all those is equally wrong? I am not encouraging anyone to see the video, but I think that sometimes it is hard to define the boundary where you really have a certain educational benefit.
When viewing WWII Concentration Camp films for the first time, it’s a frightening experience. ( Esp. if you lost family in those camps ). It was at the time fairly new to human experience to try to understand that kind of mass murder. I saw very few of those films, but they were in a horrific way educational. In a way that I find deeply sad, killing 2,800 people is much worse than killing one in the eyes of many people in the world.
To seek out a beheading video for “educational purposes” just smacks of thin justification to me. Anyone out there over the age of 13 or so who doesn’t know what the word “beheading” means? No. Okay then. It doesn’t require education to understand that a man was killed by having his head cut off while he was conscious.
One gains nothing but visceral graitification on a completely prurient level by actually viewing said video. Nothing educational is gained. The Anthony Burgess word created in the vocabulary for the book A Clockwork Orange comes to mind: Horrorshow.
I read my last post in Preview, but I wish to ammend something I wrote, because it may well cause a firestorm and it was not in any way meant to be inflammatory.
Human history is filled with holocausts. I did not mean to imply that the Jewish experience was unique to history. China, Armenia, Africans, Native Americans, the list is huge.
Rather, I meant to say that being presented with motion picture filmed evidence of same was new. Not necessarily educational in the classic sense, but for those incapable of comprehending ( or, in vigorous denial ), the documentary footage shot of mass graves, and so on served a terrible purpose.
I’m sorry if what I wrote implied in any way that the WWII mass murders were the first of their kind in human history.
You’re assuming watching the video is educational because of something educational in the video. I’d take the tact that the educational part is in the watching… and you’re not learning about beheading, but rather yourself.
I chose not to see the video because I agree that one probably gains next to nothing from it. This was a choice, but I would hesitate to make a general rule out of it. In this case my decision was at least in part based on testimonials from those who have seen it.
Sometimes the benefit is as basic as realizing in a personal, concrete way that what you see is real in a way that unfortunately is very hard to achieve through abstract knowledge.
I really don’t want to overdo the nazi history parallel, but the following is an example of what I had in mind: Like every German student I visited a concentration camp back in school. I learned nothing factual that day that I hadn’t known before. Nonetheless it was a very important experience that I would not want to miss. One can argue that such a visit offers nothing that books can’t give you. But for me it made things I had known for years much more real, more tangible beyond any doubt.
Seriously, I don’t want to excuse any freak who enjoys watching this video but I don’t think we should condemn everybody who watches it.
People should know what human beings are capable of doing to each other. The actual act of seeing it leaves much more of an impression than just hearing about it.
I kind of agree with ogrish.com “Can you handle life?”
Unless I’m mistaken, and sometimes I am, in this country it’s was once a big FAMILY afternoon to go to the hanging. In the movie The Great Train Robbery, everyone turned out for a hanging, so I believe that public execution was a popular event in England, also. I believe public stoning to death (murderers, adulterors,etc.) is still a pastime in the Mideast. The series known as The Faces of Death was a big hit in video rental stores.
Man’s inhumanity towards other men is a time honored tradition. It’s everywhere, you do not have to go far from home to find it.