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G. M. (Mark) Baker's avatar

It seems worth noting in this context that most of us have never seen death except on a screen. Our ancestors knew the reality of death well. People died at home. Half the children died before they reached the age of five. People killed and butchered their own chickens, pigs, and cattle, and hunted for wild meat. They had real blood on their hands, saw the light go out of real eyes, felt real corpses grow cold. They knew the reek and rot of death intimately. However much of a fascination the snuff clip may have become, it has become so to a people unfamiliar with the real thing. If they are fascinated with it because they do not know it, or if they are inured to because it has only ever been a story, a point of entertainment, to them, is more than I can say. But I cannot help feeling that this has all become to people a kind of drama, a play, a thing of simple goodies and baddies, in which death is fascinating not because it is death, which they do not know, but because it is a trope of drama in an otherwise tedious existence.

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Graham Cunningham's avatar

Three thoughts:

1) I haven't seen any of this snuff stuff - neither recently nor ever - so it is not difficult to avoid it (and I do spend a very lot of time on the internet).

2) Second: We are now in an age in which the downsides of liberal individualism are becoming increasingly apparent (and yes there have also been huge upsides). The tragic problem with Western liberalism is that it does not know where to stop. When you valorise each and every kind of liberty, you 'liberate' human appetites that would be better repressed (like they were when I was a kid in the 1950's.

3) your essay doesn't mention another kind of 'snuff'.....murder (now often serial murder) tv who-dunnits that have come to completely dominate tv drama ( at least they do in Europe). It hasn't always been this way; when I was young it was mostly about robbery and murder plot-lines were a rarity.

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