I’m a Pundit

I was reading yet another story today on the myriad of Suicide Support Websites out there. These are not websites which try to stop people committing suicide, but infact encourage them.

From a personal standpoint I think it is everyone’s right to take their own life. So when the government announced it was going to make sites supporting suicide illegal I decided to look, and shocked though I was, the government was infact Right.

I took a look at several sites claiming to be there to support people who were thinking of ending their life. However a quick look at the members of these sites showed a much more sinister side to human nature.

These websites each had three distinct types of people.

Those Truly Seeking Help – There were some people who had suffered so badly that they were thinking of ending it all

The Predators – These came in several forms, none of them good.

The Attention Seekers – We all have one of those people in our lives somewhere which have threatened to kill themselves in a desperate bid for attention, the words ‘breeding ground’ come to mind here.

The most interesting to study here would most definitely be the predators. Many of them seemed to be living out their ‘suicide fantasy’ through either an attention seeker or a real suicider. They would first gently and then more forcefully shove people to what they should do to kill themselves in a rather perverted way.

They also sent hate mail, in rather vast quantities. These ones were not trying to fulfil a suicide fantasy, they were simply sad people seeking the feeling of power. As soon as I joined the website I was hit by a barrage of abuse that was obviously designed by these people to drive me over the edge.

The third type was sexual. Yes even by posting my real profile of 23 year old male, not the young schoolgirl type profile I got hit with an unexpected amount of emails coercing me to have sex, send nude pictures or perform an artistic show on cam, these tended to come from men in their forties of Arab origins, and was to say the least very concerning since a large number of site members were underage girls.

The Attention Seekers were the least interesting, they get shoved out of social circles in everyday life and it seems like they congregated here to try one last ditch at grabbing someone’s focus for a few minutes. These were fairly easy to spot due to their bi-weekly suicide ‘attempts’ and how publicly they announced what they were doing.

The Real Suicide members were those that really needed help. Many of them would shyly post about the pros and cons of a particular suicide method, while keeping the reasons for their intended departure well hidden. These are the people that really need someone’s help, someone to listen and someone to talk to. It’s a shame therefore that if these people suffered the same kind of abuse that I did then there is little doubt in my mind that they may be driven to suicide when they could have been saved and brought back on track to lead normal lives.

It is therefore my opinion that the government should ban the sites supporting suicide immediately, and also heavily regulate the sites that are set up for helping people who are on the brink return.

Currently the sites are filled with Sick Fucks and Attention Whores who need to be kept well away from those truly seeking help!

written by Oli \\ tags: Ban, Illegal, Internet, Murder, Suicide, Support, Websites

I read this article on CNets Crave today and was glad to see that none other than Harvard University have found that Violent games really do not have that much of an effect on a childs behavior.

Personally I have stood by this belief for a long time. I think Violence in a person is formed from their upbringing, their peers and their lifestyle. I think I first realised this when I was very young.

One of my friends at the time was from a devout christian family, his parents were so against violence that they even went as far as taking Red Alert off him when they found out it was a war game.

Of course from the outset he had an unhealthy obsession with guns and violence. The very shield that his parents ahd set up to protect him had infact driven him to explore the world of violence.

I am not sure how things worked out for him, his family moved away a long time ago. All in all though I think the fact remains that by preventing someone from experiencing and learning about the world around them can only ever end in disaster.

I think this is highlighted by several of the school shootings that have happened in the USA. These children do not talk about videogames or even violence on the news. They talk about how they were repressed, how they were kept off the team, how someone else got the girl.

The truth of the matter is that the personailty of these children was such that no matter what they would have ended up in some violent crime.

The fact of the matter is that the popularity of violent games is very rarely down to the amount of violence in it. It is down to the challenge, beating those around you and so forth.

Of course violence ina game is a factor, but its teh same factor that drives people to join the army. Should we get rid of our armed forces because they encounter violence, even if the majority are balanced, caring individuals?

I worry sometimes that the western world will become too nanny state. The Government will maintain a drakonian control and people will lose the ability to experience, we would become effectively no more than ants. Unable to do anything more than work.

In the UK this is already becoming increasingly apparant, whether you look at the new smoking laws, crack down on drinking, or harsh drugs laws. Then it pervades into your everyday life, telling you that you can no longer do DIY electrics in your home.

This government needs to rememebr that it is here to serve the people, not make people lead the lives it thinks they should.

Personally I think most laws are there to make you think before you break them, but so many people in our government are so now distanced that they do not realise that a multitude of laws are broken constantly every day by your average law abiding citizen simply down to common sense, not including times when people simply do not care whether something is against the law.

written by Oli \\ tags: Computers, Video Games, Violence

Net Nutrality is a very hot topic which is very conveniently looked over by the world media.

What is Net Nutrality?

Basically Net Nutrality  is the protection of the internet from ISPs who are looking to blackmail every single internet website.

International Giant Virgin for instance has already stated that it will reduce bandwidth to it’s customers on websites that do not pay a premium in the near future, many other ISPs have also stated this as well.  So why not th big debate?  Most ISPs are owned by media corporate giants, go figure!

What would this mean to us users?  Well the general degridation of the internet, starting up a new internet business would be harder due to the new lack of bandwidth and many businesses would go out of business because they could not aford to be held to ranom by a multitude of network providers.

Imagine for instance you lived in the midle of nowhere, isolated but in contact by regular bus services.   Now imagine that the bus decided to only go to places that paid a premium, limiting you to comercial giants who could suddenyl afford to rip you off because you had no choice of going anywhere else and they had the excuse of paying costs to increase prices.  Sure you could walk to another place, but it would take all day!

The only option left would be to move house to somewhere with a better ISP.

Of course net nutrality doesn’t just stop at drawing awarness to bandwidth reduction, you may also find that in ISP could cut a site off, cut you off from other ISPs (Whch has already been done in Europe, causing an Uproar in World of Warcraft gamers who can no longer access the game because their ISP failed to reach a deal with another ISP on its Internet strategy)

Now imagine your ISP cut you off from all the news sites but its own, all the shops but its own, and so forth and so on.  The internet would be in danger of becoming sectioned, with most people being forced to use one single provider.

Now you could say that one ISP could stick to net nutrality and keep open bandwidth to all sites connected to it.  Now, just playing a theory here, what would happen if all the other websites turned on it and blocked it completely?

I have to admit the thought scare me.

written by Oli \\ tags: Internet, ISPs, Net Nutrality