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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

I doubt this livestream will actually happen, but if it does, I hope people will realize ahead of time that this will not be enjoyable or entertaining to watch.

A paralyzed guy, sitting in a wheelchair, will be shot, slump over, die, blood will ooze from the wound, and then that's it.

His actions were murderous and atrocious, but there is no value in watching his life being extinguished in real time. Just because it is available to be seen doesn't mean it benefits us to see it.

I am afraid that many people will realize that too late and have to deal with the memory, if not the pangs of conscience, of having watched a snuff film.

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It will happen on Truth Social. Did you forget the president OWNS a social network?

bruh https://www.whitehouse.gov/trumptv/

That's just a YouTube embed

No, it's a brand, a platform and societal acceptance. YouTube embed is just what it does now.

hardly anyone watches it (low 1000s), wouldn't be surprised to learn its just other news orgs looking for more news circle jerk stories or a bunch of bots there just for the comment feed / manipulation

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...

Can you think of a promotional event that would be benefecial to that platform's notoriety

can you think of anything that would actually increase viewership long term?

or is it the audience of one taken to the extreme?

The one he wants to sell algo traders high speed front-runner access to for a smooth $100k a month?

As I said in another thread. The point is to desensitise society before moving on to more extreme behaviour.

You've decided this unilaterally for everyone else, including the families of the unarmed service members who were murdered?

All executions should be public if not for transparency's sake.

If we have capital punishment, then executions should be public so that the public understands the weight of what's being done in their name. Unfortunately, that is very far from the reason this is being done here.

Edit: OK, apparently I can’t make a prescriptive statement without getting piled on with people saying that’s not how it actually is. Noted.

You've been lied to your entire life about this.

Executions used to be public because people love watching bad people die. You might not like it because of some Englightenment-era idea to the contrary, but it's an inescapably true facet of human nature. The only reason Britain and France stopped holding public executions is the crowds eventually started to get too rowdy and governments needed to move them indoors.

The moral-outrage excuse was invented afterwards.

> s/bad people/the designated outgroup/

You seem to be overly optimistic about the average person's moral compass. It's entirely driven by mob mentality and an authority figure.

Calling it 'mob mentality' is a strawman. Democracy is ultimately just two armies going to the ballot box to see which is bigger. The winner gets to write the laws and, by extension, define who the 'bad people' or 'outgroups' are. You can dress it up in moral terms, but majority rule is always going to look like a mob to the minority that lost.

No, those are different things. I was using mob mentality in the true sense there to describe the psychology of the individual participants.

Certainly that can also occur at the ballot box or in any of the processes leading up to it but that's far from a given.

How the resultant situation appears to any given minority will again vary. Regardless, appearance is not reality.

As to the response of the general public to any given enforcement action, no that can not typically be described as mob mentality. That's precisely why the situation of a public execution as a spectacle being discussed here is noteworthy. It is very much the exception.

In parting I will note that I don't think the term straw man quite means what you appear to think it does.

I'll also note that describing democracy as "two armies" is specific to the dysfunction that has developed in the US. It's not an accurate description of most modern democracies.

That used to be the norm in many places and times. I don’t think it ever really cultivated public appreciation of its weight - and more like the opposite. It makes it lighter

What weight? Shooting someone is way more merciful than long prison sentence.

You should read some history.

The general public fucking loves watching executions. It used to be regular entertainment. They were massive events.

It was like going to the circus. You would bring your young children and goad them to cheer when the trap door opens.

Sating their bloodlust regularly will do nothing to undo their simple-mindedness.

We are barely literate and naked apes. We love violence.

The people who wanted to see this guy dying will thoroughly enjoy it, and teach their children to enjoy it. They will teach them that this is "Justice". They will feel fulfilled and heard and represented. They will literally feel safer, now that a "Bad guy" got solved just like in the movies and other stories.

Do you not realize how goddamned popular the torture porn of "24" was? Including to the Heritage Foundation which paid for the cast to come run a panel at one of their conventions? Including a supreme court justice who explicitly pointed at "24" as justification for allowing torture?

This isn't solely in conservative circles either. Right now you have lots of people who usually vote democrat showing that their only complaint about this administration's stupidity and crimes and crassness is that it isn't being used to oppress the specific rich people they want to watch die in agony.

Seriously though, you aren't the only person in this comment section taking this position, and I just cannot fathom how some of you missed this in every single part of history we know about. It wasn't subtle.

Executions are frequently public, the barrier is just that people have to attend in person, so relatively few people do so. Livestreaming is something new.

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