I never fails to amaze me the level of stupidity people will sink to just to go viral and become “internet famous”. This couple were basically teenagers. Like most teenagers, I’m sure they stayed up nights dreaming about what they would do with all the money they made once their internet videos made them famous. Now their kids will grow up without a father, the mother will probably see jail time, or even if not, she will have a conviction on her record that will make it impossible for her to live a normal life and support her kids, and that doesn’t even scratch the surface of how she and her kids will feel about what happened for the rest of their lives. All for what?
The sad part is that these two people are not at all uncommon in America today. Our education system has been gutted, and we are churning out far too many young adults ill-equipped to handle life. The internet in turn compounds the problem and leads to all sorts of poor decision making based off nothing more than “some guy on the internet did it!”.
How did “famous for stupid” become “almost as good as famous for talent and achievement”? Has it always been that way? Whatever, I blame Jackass.
Along with a bunch of other people, I was trapped in an airport lounge with CNN blaring when Robin Williams died. A confused girl asked her grandmother why he would have wanted to kill himself: “he was famous.” Grandmother explained that fame doesn’t necessarily make you happy, or solve all your problems. I hope it stuck.
Did Google take their entire series off of Youtube? There needs to be way stricter controls on people doing awful things to zoom up the rankings and get easy/quick money. I remember seeing a video where two white guys would put a uhaul truck unattended, leave the back open (in a black neighborhood). The boxes were filled with manure, then when people went in to investigate why a truck was sitting there open, they’d lock them in and drive off knocking them all over. Besides the fact the series was extremely racist, it also advocated kidnapping and a host of other law breaking situations. Though the victims may have signed a release (in that case they were obviously poor, cash strapped individuals who the Youtubers took advantage of) I was appalled to see Google let that stuff stay. It had millions of views and theu had hundreds of thousands of subscribers. I reported it as a violation of Googles terms and it was still up weeks later. Don’t want to go back and give them another page hit to check but I feel Google/Youtube bears some responsibility for this when stuff is reported to them, yet they let it slide and continue to pay boatloads of cash to these people. There was another series where parents would scare their 4 year old son and literally traumatized the poor kid into daily terror. Once again, Google/Youtube never took that stuff down and paid them tons of money and it wasn’t removed until police arrested them for child abuse.
It feels like this kind of thing is going to get worse and worse until the money stops flowing so freely. Google appears concerned with “copy protection”, but when it comes to “human protection” or “child protection” it’s a shrug of then shoulders.
Victor Pratt, 48, was throwing his child a birthday party when a rattlesnake slithered into his yard. Upon seeing the intruder, Pratt decided to take the opportunity to teach his party guests how to catch and cook a rattlesnake.
Narrator: 'He did not know how to catch and cook a rattlesnake."
The story, though of a dumb idea, isn’t nearly as interesting as the teaser sub-head leads you to expect. My first thought was ‘he was cooking a live rattlesnake???’
If I were swimming that close to the world’s largest land predator, I’d best less worried about the WLLP and more about my enormous set of brass balls dragging me down.
