I know this is the time of year when we’re supposed to be giving thanks and dwelling on the nobility of the human soul.
But as a lead-up to the holidays, a young man committed suicide on webcam while people watched, commented and lampooned him for twelve hours before someone thought to get help for him. And Black Friday kicked off at one Walmart with shoppers smashing through a door and trampling a holiday employee to death, actually stepping over his prone body to get to the bargains.
It’s as if either people don’t understand the things they’re witnessing, or simply don’t care. And I’m not sure which is worse.
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But they don’t do that everywhere and some events are given a pass. How many news stories for Ipod sales, Harry Potter books, retirement concert tours, etc have you seen the cable news channels cover where they were talking about the lines that started forming the day before? I’ve seen tons of them myself.
The regs change from place to place and even where they can run you off the big money event people sometimes get an event permit to allow it or are simply given a pass.
Jerry, I’m not suggesting someone should call the police every time someone says something crazy on the Internet. But regardless of how trollish someone is or is not, if someone were to post a comment that they were going to commit suicide I’d never egg them on. Period. Moreover, were I watching a live Webcam of someone who had purportedly taken a lethal dose of pills, I’d call 911 immediately. Period.
I’m not going to get into a lengthy discussion about what I’d do in different scenarios. Suffice to say, I try to do the right thing. I can’t rescue everyone but at the least I can try my best not to harm others.
In various places around the internet, I have videos posted of a guy(well, me) slicing his palm in a ritual to summon something, and later a large hand coming out of a mirror, as well as a pseudoJack Torrance chopping pictures with an axe, along with starships coming out of cloak. It’s possible that people didn’t take it seriously enough.
I’ve done the Black Friday thing from the shopping angle and from the working angle. I’ve only ever seen a couple people really THAT focused on buying something to even be impolite, let alone do something like trample someone. When they opened the casino part of the racetrack, there was a pretty tremendous rush to get in. An older woman tripped as she came onto the carpet. A whole slew of people stopped to help her.
I always try to believe people are basically good. The internet seems to make people think they can act however they want, hey, it’s just the internet. Still, there are consequences.
Luigi, just search for “Wal-Mart” at Google News. You’ll find numerous articles about the incident.
Bill, I used “crying wolf” as the closest analogy to try to, hëll, explain why those people didn’t call te authorities, but I was not saying that the Dearly Departed (and I AM being Serious when I say that, it’s sad to see a person or hear they have taken their own life) Mr. Biggs was specifically the one “crying wolf” What I was saying, but perhaps was not clear on was that, there were probably others who performed this type of threat as a joke, be reality or unreality (i.e. fiction) and then as a society we believed and then it turned out that we were made suckers.
Yes, I aware that some suicides that are completed are not the first attempt, but as I said I was not pointing to him as crying wolf, I was looking to elsewheres that the “wolf” was not there so that when this kid was it was “Yeah! Right! Tell me another one, hey I wonfer if that Choclate Rain guy has something new”
However, Bill your point, for this particular young man, if we were to judge solely on his past actions and him alone, that the anaology is not correct is actually right, I would never make light of the fact that this young man had serious problems and decided to terminate himself as the only (in his mind) solution, and had threatened several times before.
From 5+ years of working retail, I can that there are plenty of customers who cannot see or consider anything beyond what they want. Once my store had an electrical fire in the wiring in the ceiling and all the shoppers had to be cleared out of the building for safety reasons. While everyone was waiting outside, one lady suggested, “Well, if they know where the problem is they should just let us shop in the other part of the store.” Think about that: Everyone knows there’s a problem with the wiring, the risk is so great they’ve evacuated the building, there’s the potential for the whole building to go up in flames (the fire department was there), and all this person could think of was why they should let her keep shopping. It may not be as bad as crushing someone to death, but it does show the single-mindedness some people have.
// But they don’t do that everywhere and some events are given a pass. How many news stories for Ipod sales, Harry Potter books, retirement concert tours, etc have you seen the cable news channels cover where they were talking about the lines that started forming the day before? I’ve seen tons of them myself. //
So have I, and I find them to be just as tasteless as the “black Friday” feeding freezings. The thing to remember is this is a realitivly new thing in society, only about a decade old. Not to long ago getting up in the middle of the night to go to a store to be the first in line for a sale, or the on sale date of an appliance, or a new book would have been considered absurd. Hëll most people weren’t aware of the “onsale” date of things like appliances or books, it’s only been in the past decade that things like that are advertised and promoted.
Growing up the only thing I remember people getting up early to stand in line overnight for was concert tickets, and even that was something you stopped doing after a certain age. My parents thought I (and my siblings) were crazy for standing in line overnight for Springsteen or U2 tickets, the idea of them doing it would have been absurd. It’s been a long time but I don’t rememeber anyone older then mid twenties waiting in line for tickets, once you “grew up” it just really wasn’t done. And the idea of keeping young kids up all night for such things, (like the Harry Potter releases) would have been considered bad parenting. (Hëll I got in big trouble in high school sneaking out during a snow storm to stand in line for U2 tickets, today my parents would have taken me and stood in line with me, that’s how much the world has changed on these things).
// The regs change from place to place and even where they can run you off the big money event people sometimes get an event permit to allow it or are simply given a pass. //
True but just because the “big money” can get a pass doesn’t mean they should, and sometimes it only takes one incident to change the rules. Once upon a time general seating for concerts was standard, then a few people were trampled to death by people rushing to get good seats at a Who concert in the 70’s and almost overnight the rules changed, general seating no longer allowed at events over a certain size. Hopefully the same kind of thing will happen here and some of the maddness will end. History shows that it usually takes an unfortunate incident or two before sanity takes hold.
Do you go through your daily life inconspicuous, where breaking some kind of ninja-cover is the rare exception for you, that what your saying this isn’t just a card being played and makes any sense? What is this “craving attention” agenda no one can ever find anyone else ever admitting to? What does that even mean?
Your strawman doesn’t qualify as someone admitting they “craved attention.” No martyrs indulges in… anything. What you cited was instead some other stupid thought that may be followed up by a stupid action. Why can’t you mock the stupid thought admitted to, rather than attributing agendas to others that make no sense?
Bill Myers: “Jerry, I’m not suggesting someone should call the police every time someone says something crazy on the Internet. But regardless of how trollish someone is or is not, if someone were to post a comment that they were going to commit suicide I’d never egg them on. Period. Moreover, were I watching a live Webcam of someone who had purportedly taken a lethal dose of pills, I’d call 911 immediately. Period.“
That’s fine, Bill, but not everyone is you. Further, maybe not everyone who was egging him on necessarily thought they were egging on a real suicide. Again, several stories on the matter have stated he had made past comments about going away to kill himself and detailing to some degree how he was going to do it. The likelihood of there having been some people who had been dealing with him for a year or more and who had their fill of his “I’m going to go and kill myself like this” comments and got sarky with his latest threat is, optimistically, more likely than everyone who egged him on knowing that he had really taken an overdose before moving into camera view and settling down in bed.
Is this a very sad and tragic thing to read about? Yes. But I’m not sure that this is the example of how sick we’ve become or how low we’ve stooped as a civilization that some across the net have been playing this up to be. There are too many factors and too many unknown variables in this to hold it up as anything more than a simple (if that can really be said of them) tragic suicide.
To believe this event is the thing that it has been described by many as; I would have to be willing to believe the absolute worst about everyone involved without really knowing the first fact about them or their prior histories/interactions with this individual. Given the nature of the web, the jaded nature that it creates in some and the possibility that many of the people egging him on were stupid teenagers/early twenty somethings being flip and sarcastic themselves I’m not really ready to do that just yet.
It’s tragic that this kid didn’t get the help he needed. It’s tragic that he committed suicide. It’s even more tragic that he did it in a way that’s going to effect more lives just the people usually effected by suicides. But it’s not, at least in my POV, the example of our failing, sick and twisted civilization that some blogs, posters and news stories are making it out to be.
There seems to be a lot of discussion on the idea of “crying wolf” and also about always responding to threats regarding the webcam suicide.
As someone fresh out of high school (well, less than half a decade, at any rate), let me assure you that if people responded every time someone made a threat of death (their own or another’s), it would be a huge waste of resources. Skepticism when dealing with such a threat is totally necessary, and it can often be difficult to determine whether or not the person making the threat is totally serious. Just last week I read a blog entry from a friend of mine who moved out of the area that was an apparent “suicide note.” I have read many similar entries before from friends who have dealt with depression, but this was the very first time that following it after a few days there was a second update, from the same person, who after downing many pills was in the hospital. I’m happy that the person is still alive, but I don’t feel like I should be held responsible for not immediately contacting authorities. It’s like calling an ambulance when someone falls off their bike. Yes, sometimes the biker seriously injures themselves, but more often the wounds are superficial and the biker is charged with a monumental ambulance bill.
It seems that when people say we should respond to every threat, they are merely looking at the numbers that such a response was necessary, and not the overwhelmingly larger number when it wasn’t. How many blog entries have I seen from people who had just attempted suicide? One. How many have I seen indicating that the person was considering the act? Hundreds. And I would presume that most people who’ve been on the net for a while know that a person is much more likely to be a troll than to be serious.
One thing that ties both the Wal-Mart incident and the suicide incident together is that the reactions to them wouldn’t have seemed bad without the results.
People line up the day before an event all the time. As someone already mentioned, we constantly hear stories about people lining up for movies or store openings days in advance. It’s easy to look back in retrospect and say, “Why didn’t someone call the police and have them dispersed?” but are any of us going to call the police when people start camping out for the next Harry Potter movie?
It also seems obvious in hindsight that egging on the suicide victim was horrendous. However, before he died he wasn’t a suicide victim, he was just another guy on the internet. If people had been yelling “Do it!” and he hadn’t done it, it wouldn’t have seemed like that big a deal. We’d probably still think those guys were jerks, but we wouldn’t think they were seriously trying to make someone kill himself.
These deaths are tragic and people made mistakes leading up to them. I’m not trying to take anything away from that. Steps should definitely be taken to prevent tragedies like them in the future. But at the same time, hundreds of people have died in Nigerian riots just since we started this thread. People die all the time and there’s a danger of putting too much meaning into things.
It was *not* obvious that people should have called the cops on the guy making his dozenth suicide claim. It was not obvious that this particular crowd was going to turn violent when crowds all across America didn’t. It may seem obvious in hindsight, but I don’t expect other people’s foresight to be as clear as my hindsight.
An excellent point, Jason.
And Darren — although people staying overnight may be new, the idea of long lines for hours certainly isn’t. I can’t be the only one here who remembers standing in line for quite a long time on the day that The Empire Strikes Back opened.
In the Wal-Mart case, I would lay most of the blame on store management. How hard can it be to have a policy of “we let X number of people in at a time, then another X after a two-minute break,” and so on?
Granted, from what I’ve read the crowd broke down the door — but then you were lacking enough in the way of security to present that. This was a big crowd, not an armed camp, and they should have been prepared.
TWL
// From 5+ years of working retail, I can that there are plenty of customers who cannot see or consider anything beyond what they want. Once my store had an electrical fire in the wiring in the ceiling and all the shoppers had to be cleared out of the building for safety reasons. While everyone was waiting outside, one lady suggested, “Well, if they know where the problem is they should just let us shop in the other part of the store.” Think about that: Everyone knows there’s a problem with the wiring, the risk is so great they’ve evacuated the building, there’s the potential for the whole building to go up in flames (the fire department was there), and all this person could think of was why they should let her keep shopping. It may not be as bad as crushing someone to death, but it does show the single-mindedness some people have. //
I’ve had simular experiences in retail, but it’s not just retail where people have that mindset.
A few years ago I was working out at the gym when the fire alarm went off. Some electrical wiring started sparking. The building was evactuated, the fire department and the police came, a lot of people just went home. Some of us including myself weren’t able to just go home because things like our car keys and our wallets were in our lockers in the locker rooms, and we weren’t able to get them when the building was evacuated.
The fire department was very sympathic to this and told us to hang out and once it was deemed safe they would work out a way for us to get our stuff. Took about an hour an a half but finally we were told that the firemen would escort us to our lockers (and our lockers only) in groups of 2-3 to just open our lockers, get our stuff and follow the firemen out. The power to the building was off so we were led in by flashlight weilding firemen. All in all I though the whole thing was handled well, so did most people.
There are of course always exceptions, two in this case. One was a woman who insisted she needed to take a shower. The fact that the power was off and an electrical fire could start at any time didn’t faze her, she inisted she needed to take a shower and didn’t understand why they wouldn’t let her. (Why she couldn’t go home and take a shower, who knows).
The other was a man who insisted he needed something he left on the gym floor. He was told that the gym floor was still unsafe but he insisted he had something very important there. Finally the fireman got him to cop to what he left in the gym, was it his car keys, no, his wallet, nada, he left a water bottle and he was absolutly adamant that someone go into the gym and retrieve his property. The fireman responce was classic, “you know if it was your car keys I might, might, have one of my men go get it for you, but I am not putting anyone in potential danger for a water bottle, you can buy another”. The guy was so outraged at this he was actually asking for firefighters badge number so he could call his supervisor and complain. Talk about having wrong priorities.
What was the intended outcome of challenging him to commit to killing himself that wasn’t bad?
I’m thinking the ounce of prevention equaling a pound of cure maxim dismisses the wisdom of allowing someone to progress on a path to someplace totally serious. Or even to a path to someplace where they smoke or drink or eat themselves to death — or take it out on someone else. The infrastructure is inconvenienced anyway you look at it.
// And Darren — although people staying overnight may be new, the idea of long lines for hours certainly isn’t. I can’t be the only one here who remembers standing in line for quite a long time on the day that The Empire Strikes Back opened. //
True but I don’t think most folks waited overnight, nor was there any advertising that encoraged this. Nor was Empire Strikes Back something that was going away, if you didn’t get to the 2 PM showing you got to the 4 PM showing. If you didn’t get that day, you saw it the next day. There was no “while supplies last” or “offer only good till 10 am”. And lets face it, in terms of Empire, (and the same could be said of a U2 Concert), it was the die hard fans who waited in line. The mainstream adverage folks did not.
Things like Harry Potter releases at Midnight, the release of the Ipod and the feeding freenzy encouragement of Black Friday and marketing such things to the non die hard fan (or shopper) are realitivly new.
Black Friday always existed, and stores always had special sales, (They used to be called “day after Thanksgiving” sales), it was a high volume retail day because it was the traditional begining of the Christmas shopping season and a lot of people were off that day, (thus making it a good day to go X-Mas shopping). What’s changed is the way stores are promoting that day, the feeding frenzy nature of it has only existed in the past decade of so. Prior to that, if a store ran out of something on “Black Friday” you got a raincheck and came back at a later date to get the item. No riots, no standing in line the night before.
The feeding frenzy aspect really evolved as a marketing tool to attract people away from just shopping online, (and to some degree it’s worked, but when things like this happen you have to ask, “at what cost?”)
Darren J Hudak: “True but I don’t think most folks waited overnight, nor was there any advertising that encoraged this. Nor was Empire Strikes Back something that was going away, if you didn’t get to the 2 PM showing you got to the 4 PM showing. If you didn’t get that day, you saw it the next day. There was no “while supplies last” or “offer only good till 10 am”. And lets face it, in terms of Empire, (and the same could be said of a U2 Concert), it was the die hard fans who waited in line. The mainstream adverage folks did not.”
Except that neither this or your earlier comment about average people not being aware of on sale dates prior to the last decade or so is true. Most people have known about the on sale dates of major “must have” items for years now. As a teen in the 80s I knew when the big release CD was coming out, when the hot author’s book was set to hit the shelves or when the hot new game for the home gaming systems was due to drop. That kind of thing was advertised and promoted for weeks in advance and sometimes for months in advanced.
Jeez, dude, watch ‘I love the 80s’ or ‘I love the 70s’ on VH-1 sometime. They actually had blips about the hot fad items from back then that had people lined up for blocks and overnight. Read up on your rock stars from the 50s through the 80s. Part of the reason that many areas did away with the “Standing Room Only” system was that people would be in line for hours upon hours and then stampede the doors when the opened. People got badly hurt any number of times before the localities stepped in and made promoters stop it.
Standing in line the night before the morning of for sales isn’t that new either. When these conversations have come up before; my uncle has pointed out that he got his first new (rather than beaten up and used) cloths washing machine an miscellaneous other items for his place by standing in a line that started the night before for the Washington Day sales that went on in DC when he lived there in the late 60s.
Not new to the last decade or even the last three decades.
And lets face it, in terms of Empire, (and the same could be said of a U2 Concert), it was the die hard fans who waited in line. The mainstream adverage folks did not.
Darren, I was ten years old at the time, and I stood in line for a hellishly long time — as did my father and my brother (six years old). That’s not “the diehard fans” — TESB, and other films like it, were absolute mainstream crazes. Jerry’s response says pretty much everything I would have, only more coherently, so I’ll leave it to him.
Your point about that sort of thing being more encouraged by retail outlets now is a much better one — I’ll admit that I pay little attention to ads if I can, but you’re probably right that there’s a more active “recruitment” for the Black Friday insanity these days.
TWL
Darren’s got me to thinking about accounts of this kind of mob shopping madness from the past. One sticks in my head–a scene from the 1963 Jerry Lewis movie Who’s Minding the Store;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nROMRVUhXuY&feature=related
I recall a store in Albany…Cohoes, or something like that…which had a woman’s sale that looked a lot like that scene, judging from reports I got back from lady friends. And this was back in the early 80’s and I believe it was something of a tradition long before then.
Those that were looking for bargains could have easily gone on the internet right on thanksgiving day and ordered what they wanted and even have gotten free shipping. There are no sales that are worth the aggrevation. I feel horrible for the family of the employee who was killed while these animals went in to get themselves a dumb tv or an ipod or whatever was on sale. It does lead me to believe we do come from monkeys, although i’ve never seen monkeys kill themselves over a tv.
Stupid humans. We’re a virus away from extinction.
I swear, those people acted like it was a feeding frenzy. People would kill their children if they could get a bargain.
Joe V.
See, Joe, this is what I mean by getting carried away. The actions of a single mob should not take precedence over the innumerable acts of decency that typify the human species.
Not only was this mob a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent of humans in general, they don’t even typify the actions of the shopping hordes, thousands of whom managed to go shopping without killing anyone.
I don’t know if the 19 year old in question was someone who constantly threatened suicide and people got tired, but it still doesn’t excuse egging then kid on. It might explain the lack of action, since I don’t know how he did it. If it was a claim that he chugged a bottle of pills off camera, it might not have been taken seriously.
As for the Wal-Mart event, there is no excuse. The irony is the celebration of a life begun in poverty being observed by a deadly display of greed.
Joe V.: “It does lead me to believe we do come from monkeys, although i’ve never seen monkeys kill themselves over a tv.
Stupid humans. We’re a virus away from extinction.
I swear, those people acted like it was a feeding frenzy. People would kill their children if they could get a bargain.”
And like I’ve said above; this was one group in one store in one city amongst thousands of stores and millions of people who didn’t act like retarded apes Friday morning. By all means we should point out as sub-humans and root for the eventual arrest and punishment the idiots who trampled a man to death and the inconsiderate bášŧárdš who couldn’t grasp the fact that they had to leave the now closed store because a man had just been killed because they were too fixated on their savings opportunities. But this isn’t a paintbrush for all of humanity or even just all Americans.
A little perspective goes along way. Find some.
Nothing wrong with admonishing the store and the cops for not doing more to prevent the stampede, but at the same time, I blame the “patrons” who killed the guy, and trampled him further. There is no excuse for what they did. It’s also stupid to think that rushing in to be the first in a store necessarily will be get you what you’re looking for. One can be patient, and find something that others might have overlooked, pre-order it on the Internet, pre-order it through the store, etc.
Someone mentioned the lines for the Harry Potter books. My own experience belies the notion that crashing into a store at midnight is at all necessary. Ever since the fifth book, I’ve pre-ordered the books, which I got delivered to my home on the day the book came out (at least in the case of the fifth and seventh book). On the day the seventh book came out, I took it to the Barnes & Noble in Lincoln Square, and got it autographed by Mary GrandPré, who illustrated the covers and chapter illustrations of the American edition. And I even waited deliberately until everyone else in the room passed her dais, so that I could snap a picture or two of her, and ask her if I could pose for a photo with me, without the pressure of people behind that I’d be holding up. The result?
-I got my book, just like everyone else, and on the same day.
-I got to take my picture with her, and added one of the pics to her Wikipedia article, which up until then lacked one.
-No one got trampled.
In this age of Internet shopping, you’d think the idiots who stampede through stores at midnight on Black Friday or other occasions would clue into this.
//Human stupidity is the ONLY factor.
There is nothing in Walmart, and never will be anything there that is worth more than a human life.
Economic or historical conditions will never ever change that.//
Yes, but the fact that people are so obsessed with BUYING things, that they believe a shopping opportunity to be that important… you think that comes out of thin air?
Okay, I may have been a bit condescending in my post. I apologize.
Manny: “I don’t know if the 19 year old in question was someone who constantly threatened suicide and people got tired, but it still doesn’t excuse egging then kid on.”
First:
Second:
Now, were they really egging him on or were they simply being sarcastic with a person that they rightly or wrongly viewed as a troll or a nuisance who had made similar “hollow” statements in the past? Think about it. If someone kept occasionally saying that they were going to go slit their wrists, swallow a bottle of pills or leap off of a tall building as a response to negative interaction on various blogs; how long do you think it would be before the really sarcastic people on the blogs started making comments that could, if someone finally does kill themselves, be read after the fact as egging that person on?
People poke trolls with sticks all over the web. If some guy that’s perceived to be a troll keeps saying stuff about slitting his wrists or popping too many pills he’s going to eventually get responses like people telling him to remember to slit them this way rather than that way or to be sure to take at least this many and it’ll be really helpful to wash ‘em down with this really strong alcoholic drink. Most people saying things like that don’t expect that the guy will actually commit suicide. They simply think they’re flipping a troll or some poster they dislike the metaphorical bird.
I’d like to think that the majority of people who saw the live feed and posted foolish things didn’t believe that what was being shown was really happening. I’d like to think that most people wouldn’t just crack jokes while knowing that a boy really was passing away from a drug overdose right before their eyes. I’m simply not willing to write off all of the people who may have commented with statements that are now seen as vastly different than what they would have been had it been an idiot pulling a stupid hoax for attention.
Like I said before; many people are jaded about what they see on the web. Hopefully the majority of the people who watched him die were jaded by internet shenanigans and just believed that they were watching yet another fake net video.
news.google returns 1063 results for “justin.tv webcam suicide” but that shrinks to 2 when you add the word “troll.” What seems to qualify him as a troll is that he talked about suicide.
Why are people here calling this guy a troll? Why isn’t it enough to say he talked about suicide, he did it, and people he pìššëd-off talking about suicide watched and posted “LOL.” What is the urgency to attribute strawman-motives to him?
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/miami-dade/breaking-news/story/781833.html
Pembroke Pines teen who broadcast suicide had relationship problems, friend says
This bit from page 2 is interesting as well, but for different reasons.
This is rather interesting as well. From 2004.
Japan’s internet ‘suicide clubs’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/4071805.stm
This is rather interesting as well. From 2004.
Japan’s internet ‘suicide clubs’
http://
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/4071805.stm
(You all will have to put the link back together. I’m catching in the filters again.)
…like there’s no conflict of interest in citing those who ridiculed his suicide to verify this guy was a troll.
Some might consider the Walmart debacle to be nothing but a replay of the old adage “never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers (a variation of a similar original saying by R.A.H.), but this and the webcam suicide both have their roots in a very common mindset: IT’S ALL ABOUT ME!!!
Those who forced the doors off their hinges and trampled the temp. employee were in that mode of thought completely…also the woman in the gym, the man who wanted to risk someone else’s life for a dámņ water bottle….IT’S ALL ABOUT ME!!!
The kid who suicided, well killing yourself is the most selfish act one can make, isn’t it?? Life is too tough so I’m going to stop my pain, and the hëll with the pain I’m causing others by my act…(and yes, I’ve had a suicide in my family). The moron’s who jeered and egged the kid on will either regret their actions and learn from it, or go on with their meaningless little lives none the smarter for it…those people I pity…There’s no way to make them responsible for their actions, and no way to prevent stupid people from acting stupid…it is what it is.
Testing…
Okay, I’m getting caught by the filter even when I remove the links so I’m going to try these one at a time.
From Technewsworld
From Tulsa World (a news site)
From the LA times blog article
latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/11/strange-record.html
The tulsa World story is here.
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?articleID=20081122_13_A5_hAfrie420365
Your articles haven’t dispelled the inherent conflict of interest in citing those who ridiculed his suicide to verify he was a troll. At best, you’ve got him for him deleting his posts, which is a privilege he was given. Being criticized for doing so by the admin who issued that privilege is still a conflict of interest.
That it isn’t as shocking as it once was is indeed the worst part of it all.
But it isn’t as though this was all new. How far back have we had cases of imbeciles on the ground urging people on building ledges to “Jump!”? Or does anyone else remember the Cabbage Patch Doll insanity where people were seriously hurt (don’t recall if there were any deaths) in the mad frenzy to get those? Remember, the IQ of a mob is inversely proportional to its size.
Andy – Count me on your side. Christmas should start a couple of weeks ahead of the day. Three weeks tops. I’ve taken to avoiding big stores whenever possible starting in mid-late October because I’ve gotten past fed up with their beginning the Christmas thing that far in advance. Oh, I love the spirot of Christmas, not to mention having fun giving to family, friends and others. But starting in October? No thanks.
The fact that our own resident troll (albeit trying to get his jollies for attention in ways other than threatening suicide) is questioning who gets to define somebody as a troll…
I’m sure the irony is lost on him.
Craig, all of my posts here are questions and observations. The appropriate and best response to your post seems to be that someone who would know has said barking mad attacks are disloyal to our hosts: peterdavid.malibulist.com/archives/006576.html#490016
Ðámņ Craig, you beat me to that one.
As for Xmas start time, one local station last year switched to all xmas music 24/7 the day after Halloween. (they waited an extra week or two this year)
On the other hand, what did actually happen Black Friday was nothing compared to the scenario that popped into my head pre-T-giving with the terrorists in India story…
I pictured 30-50 terrorists, suicide bombers armed with assualt rifles or something similar, at different malls/stores throughout the country, opening fire at 4 am into the crowds of waiting sheep …err shoppers… and then wading into the remains of the crowds and detonating themselves.
You seem to need to hear there’s an email address at the site I link to if you want to send your hostile messages to me and keep it off the board.
While not *quite* on topic, I must obsevre that Target starting putting out its Christmas merchandise before Halloween! I feel old, remembering when no Christmas merchandise wouldn’t hit the shelves until after Thanksgiving. This reminds me a little of John Wesley Harding’s “Taking Christmas Goodwill Blues”: “Christmas comes but once a year/three hundred sixty-four days to get your ášš in gear.”
Yeah, I usually try to get some discount Halloween stuff on Nov 1 but this year they were cleaning out the Halloween stuff on Halloween. Crazy. I should have bought more Bottles Of Blood when I had the chance.
Bladestar, your scenario is the very one I’ve been expecting…for what, 7 years now? It’s easy. It’s effective. It’s obvious. Why hasn’t it happened? I’d like to think we’re doing something right as an explanation but I’m not sure what that would be. Why India? Starting an India/Pakistan war doesn’t seem like a great move on Al Queda’s part. Granted, we aren’t talking about people who would boggle Sun Tzu in their strategic brilliance but still…
“Yeah, I usually try to get some discount Halloween stuff on Nov 1 but this year they were cleaning out the Halloween stuff on Halloween. Crazy. I should have bought more Bottles Of Blood when I had the chance.”
This year?!?!? Dude, I’ve been stopped from grabbing last minute items at my local K-Marts, Targets and Walmarts for the last two years because they were pulling down Halloween items and throwing Christmas stuff up on Halloween morning. Hëll, even Dollar Tree is getting stupid about it. We walked in one sometime around Nov. 1st and they had Christmas music playing in the store. I mean the way things are going… By the time Ian is in his teens he’s likely not going to understand why mommy and daddy throw stuff at the radio when ‘Jingle bells’ is playing in the summer or why they get annoyed at the Christmas displays going up on July 5th.
“Bladestar, your scenario is the very one I’ve been expecting…for what, 7 years now? It’s easy. It’s effective. It’s obvious. Why hasn’t it happened?”
You know what? That’s the really odd thing about all of this. We table top ideas all the time in training and we have worked out ways to wipe out hundreds in ten minutes or less with one man and take down entire power grids and cause widespread panic with no more than a three or four guys. And nothing we’ve come up with requires a lot of the types of activity or contacts with people outside of the country that would usually get them noticed by our people. At this point none of us can figure out why we’re not up to out necks in things like that. We’re thankful as hëll that we’re not, but we can’t help but wonder why we’re not.
Internet is full of smart-áššëš making smart-ášš comments in their smart-ášš blogs.
(not meaning this one, PAD. If you take a look around the blog community, it’s full of people believing themselves smarter and the blog gives the chance to show it)
October, Starwolf? Our grocery store started their “back to school” specials on JUNE 30, when school had been out no more than a week. Same idiocy that puts winter coats on sale in July, when I have no idea what size my kids will need in December. The Christmas stuff started creeping out in September. It’s insane, and removes all meaning but greed from the season. That’s what used to make the day after Thanksgiving such a milestone – that’s when the Christmas/Hanukkah/Solstice season started.
A comment and a question:
On top of all this, there was the tragedy in Mumbai. To me, this really hit close to home. I work in Korea and travel throughout S.E. and central Asia frequently. It could easily have been Calcutta or one of the other cities that I go to a lot. To make matters worse, I have meals almost weekly at my local Chabad House in Seoul and visit Chabad Houses frequently when I travel. They are wonderful places full of warmth and kindness. Add the Mumbai tragedy to the horrible incidents at the Wal-Mart and the internet suicide. I’m really personally shaken up about all this. Sorry, I guess that was a long comment and I didn’t mean to go off topic, but I just wanted to say it.
And now for my question: Forgive me if it’s been discussed before; I didn’t see it. What would the best way be to contact authorities if one was watching something like the internet suicide? People have said “Call 911.” but what if you don’t even know what city it’s taking place in? Would the best thing be to alert the site host or what? Again, I hope that’s not already been covered here–I just skimmed after a while.