The Gaming Den

Before I get to the main topic, I want to say the following: Generally I despise what the mainstream media focuses its attention on. They use single sensationalized tragedies as allegories for societal fears and concerns, which are usually irrelevant when compared to larger systemic problems that are left unattended.

Examples of common stories: White Attractive Woman is Kidnapped Story, Young Female Teacher Seduces Male Student Story, School Shooting Story, etc. Hell, I still have the name JonBenet Ramsey branded into my memory from 12 years ago, and at the time I watched the news as often as any other middle school-er. No wonder why that tragedy was so used. It had: the murder story, the "won't somebody think of the children" story, the sexualization of children story, the family infighting story, the mystery story, etc.

These narratives preclude real issues like: The Iraq War, International policy, the economy, health care, social security, climate change, renewable energies, pollution, growing wealth disparities, etc.
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All that being said, the following video touches on some interesting topics despite its being a media pinata:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=uQt8SvzDocw

My nebulous thoughts/questions:

1) Only two of the girls were involved in the beating, the rest just watched. How much punishment should the spectators receive? I am more generally unsure (morally and practically) as to how much punishment should be awarded to Accessories, especially Accessories after the fact.
1B) What should be the limits of punishment for not being a good Samaritan?

2) There were two older boys/men there with the girls. One acted as a lookout. The beating was taped. How much do you want to bet that they put the girls up to this? Or that they at least supported the idea of the beating, and egged them on?
2B) More generally, if age and power over another person isn't an issue: How much punishment should be awarded to person B when they tell person A to do a crime, and person A does it?

3) The media has focused more attention on this story because it was videotaped and distributed. How much more of a problem is girl on girl violence now than 10 years ago? Will this video create a narrative of increasing girl-girl violence?
3B) How much will Youtube (and the like) affect mainstream media narratives/allegories?

Thoughts? Answers?

This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.

Josh_Kablack wrote:This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.

Yeah. YouTube decided they had a moral duty to stick it to the adolescents involved, since the girls recording the beating for the purpose of posting it on YouTube for a bit of fame.

I do agree that the media recycles the same kinds of stories over again. Probably the biggest thing concerning my area right now is the dispute over the refueling tanker contract, but I haven't heard much of an update, and even using Google doesn't turn up much besides reporting that a lot of Congress is pissed over a multinational team of companies beat out Boeing in a defense contract.

The video that I linked to, which was taken down, was an edited version fit for broadcast morning TV news. There are unedited versions on the Internet. You can do a Google search and find it rather easily. I am not going to link to the video however, because it is genuinely nauseating. There isn't any depiction of physical damage/bleeding/etc, so you don't need to worry about that. But the treatment of the poor girl, and general tone of out-of-control cruelty is disturbing.

I hadn't seen the unedited version when I made the original post. It is much more visceral and moving than I had imagined. I still stand by everything that I stated in my first post. Yet, I came close to losing objectivity in this case.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=WOOURQDN

3 vids I collected this week on the subject.

Find your date in Pitttsburgh with MEGAFLIRT, it's FREE!

Yeah, that is pretty disturbing.

So is the inability to find anything but bad pron and Splogs when searching for "cheerleader beating video". I mean there's plenty of print media saying things like "violence bad", "teenagers out of control", but the video is not worth the efforts to try to find it online.

Well.
What the fuck.
The file's gone.
I just put it up there last night.

So, if anyone wants it, PM me and we'll work out some other method.

Edit: OK it might be server issues. Try again if you get a message about "File is temporarily unavailable". I refreshed the page and it's fine.
Enter capcha, wait, click DL button.