Sum up my feelings about Britney rather well. I don’t see how anyone can think she’s not really fucked up (and not doing it solely for attention). She has the world reporting whenever she farts. She never has a minute alone and no matter what, everyone will always expect her to be the white trash braindead skanky moron. She could go and get treatment, get therapy, get help and then do everything she can to turn her life around… and if she makes one tiny mistake, it’ll be plastered ALL over the internet, tabloids, gossip rags, etc.
No, most people are not as fucked up as Britney (we don’t have the financial resources she does, heh), but most people would not be shown in a flattering light if they had paparazzi on them 24/7. Who hasn’t fucked up, especially in their 20s? Yes, she takes it to new levels, but like the quotes above said, it’s pretty clear she really is fucked up and needs help.
Those aren’t restraints; they’re just the regular straps on stretchers. Most have 2 or 3 straps that go across the patient, and some even have shoulder straps that hook into the highest strap. It’s standard, and you’re required to use them on all patients. If she were actually in restraints, her hands would be tied down to the sides, and her legs, too. Restraints are leather straps with fleecy lining.
I don’t know what they’re doing to her in that photo, though - it looks like they’re trying to take her shirt off or something, I can’t tell.
And I seriously doubt she was allowed to smoke in the back of the ambulance. Ambos carry oxygen, and no one, even if they are a celebrity, is allowed to smoke inside an ambo, especially while in the back.
Apparently many times she is the one calling the press on herself. So sorry, not much sympathy to offer on that account. If she truly wanted a relatively anonymous life she would get it. Once she stops calling the paparazzi and tell them where she’ll be, stop behaving in a bizarre manner, and take care of herself she’ll stop being interesting. Lots of retired stars have gone that route and you only hear from them in HTV’s “Where are They Now?”.
Word. If anyone has the means to get the fuck out of Dodge and live the kind of life that someone *should *live who has children to raise, it’s Britney. As far as I can tell, everything she does is designed to call attention to herself.
No, there isn’t. The board doesn’t have a double-standard here. It doesn’t have any standard here. The board is a forum for people to talk with each other. Not all of these people feel the same way about the same things. Claiming that the board has a double-standard because not everyone who posts on it exhibits exactly the same behavior as everyone else is, frankly, stupid. And counter-productive, since the ultimate purpose of these boards is to foster debate, which you can’t do if everyone agrees with everyone else. If you’ve got evidence of particular posters in the Spears thread getting all high-and-mighty in some other mental illness related thread, by all means, call them out on their hypocrisy. But to broadly criticize a group of poster for not acting like some other, entirely different group of posters pisses me right off. That’s not hypocrisy. That’s not a double standard, because there is no “standard,” nor should there be. We want to have as many different kinds of people on the SDMB as possible. That’s what makes this place interesting. You are, in effect, complaining that the Dope is not a hivemind, when that is the very last thing you should want from this place.
As to the larger issue of people being insufficiently solemn when discussing the travails of a person with whom they will never interact in any way, shape, or form, I say “Meh.” And I say that with as much passion and intensity as I have ever said anything in these forums.
You don’t know that, of course. People lose their fortunes all the time, for everything from crooked accountants, agents, and lawyers to just plain blowing it all. It is from that kind of ignorance and myopia that the wealth envy of extremist leftists is born.
It kind of disturbs me sometimes that the assumption of having money = free of depression related issues. One could have no dollars, or 20 million dollars… if you get depressed or addicted to something, your networth doesn’t really figure into it. Sure, it may be easy to pay your bills with more money, but if you get depressed, or seek out a drug, it’s going to happen with or without $$$.
That just made me think of something: we all tell ourselves, and our kids, that money can’t buy happiness. Yet when we look at the stuff available to the rich, see their lives, and look at what we do in our own lives just to get by, some of us can’t help but think that money SHOULD be able to buy happiness.
Also, what is happiness? You would think that money should be able to buy happiness, but it’s been shown over and over that it cannot by the example of Britney and many lottery winners. There are people that claim to be happy making 30k per year, and many who are bitter that make 150k per year. It’s going to depend on the individual and what their emotional needs are. Money can only fill one gap, but leaves you vulnerable if other gaps are left unfulfilled–and for some, the unfulfilled gaps may deplete other fulfilled gaps over time.
Chances are good she has been blowing it all, at least recently. Chances are also good that with the type of people she surrounds herself with that she probably does not have a reliable person watching her finances or even if she does they probably can’t prevent her from spending like it’s going out of style. But even if she isn’t as rich as we think it’s still pretty likely that she has enough to live a decent lifestyle secluded somewhere safe from paparazzi.
She just hasn’t realized that it could only help her to get out of the limelight, get some real help and come back in a couple years and make her big comeback. Even if she doesn’t have much singing talent people will still fall all over themselves to book the new Brit and she can ride that gravy train for a while to rebuild her finances. I think she’s addicted to the attention she is used to getting whether it’s positive or negative.
A lot of her situation is her fault but a lot is also that despite all her money she doesn’t seem to have a real support system. She probably fires the people that truly try to help her. If her family has actually tried to help she has seemed to turn her back on them. So now it looks like the only way she will get help is to have the authorities force it on her.
Yes, this is sad that it all came to this for her. I don’t think anyone here really wishes her harm. I have her in the death pool because I thought it likely she would have a car accident at some point if they let her keep driving. And I figured with my luck on games picking her would guarantee that she’d make it through 2008. I don’t expect her to die or want her to die. The death pool is just a game and is not wishing anyone to die, despite all the jokes about it.
Actually, it does. If Britney were just Betty up the street, one cop would have shown up, tasered her, sent the kids home with dad, and hauled her to jail. Ok, maybe to a psych ward.
The LA cops are furthering America’s celebrity obsession by buying into it with their kid gloves treatment of celebs.
Don’t care about BS, don’t care much about the jokes, although I think that if she really can’t tell good attention from bad it may be partly a reflection of the fact that the rest of us can’t tell someone else’s pain from entertainment. But that’s not my issue.
What I would like to say is that this case is a really good illustration of why measuring the emergency response to an event is not a good tool for diagnosing the event. I’ll preface the rest by saying that I don’t know what the local emergency response protocols are, or if they were followed exactly. But in some places, for example, if someone calls 911 to report a child custody dispute, multiple law enforcement units will go because they’ll anticipate a domestic disturbance. If they report a person behaving irrationally, but no one is actually hurt, that may call for a police response only, even if the Baker Act is implemented and the person is transported to a hospital. If someone is hurt, or under some circumstances, say, if diabetes or an allergic reaction or an overdose of some drug or medication is suspected, EMS may go (and in a lot of places, most anywhere EMS goes a fire truck goes as well). But in places that follow strict protocols and limit dispatcher discretion, there may be lots of opportunities during the question phase for higher-level responses to be triggered, and those resources may never be used. Many such protocols are designed, basically, to overreact, because that’s considered the safest thing to do.
The six police cars in this case may have been the standard response (especially if it were coded as a domestic dispute), they may have been a pre-emptive measure to dampen the enthusiasm of the photographers in the bushes, or the caller may have said something indicating imminent danger to life. I don’t know anything about dispatching helicopters. That may have been done to discourage flight, or to keep news helicopters at a distance, or because, hey, they had a helicopter.
All I’d like to impart here is that emergency response is usually a pre-programmed and unambiguous reaction to what a caller tells a dispatcher, and it is common for too much to be sent in the way of resources because that’s the way these protocols are designed. It’s also wrong to assume without evidence that the personalities involved in an event determine the actions of public-safety workers.
I have no issue with anything you said. Just want to point out that if a pre-emptive measure was intended, it didn’t work.
In the video I saw, photographers swarmed the ambulances. I don’t know how long the lenses were on the cameras photoing Brit in the ambo, but I did see a mob of photogs surrounding both ambos, the one that Brit was in and the one that her one-year-old son was in. Pounding on the sides and shouting. Snapping photos through the windows. I don’t know how that cannot have been an arrestable offense, but perhaps there were just too many of them.
Oh look, it’s Liberal being his usual asshole self and dragging his retarded, money-worshiping libertarian bullshit into this. What a fucking surprise.
I know lots of drug addicts without money who have gotten back on track despite not having money. That’s a lot harder to do than when you have a $700,000+ a month income which you got by being a talentless hack and getting all up in my face with your bullshit for the better part of a decade. The folks who got better with no money is news. This spoiled bitch should not be news.
