Enjoying the utter destruction of it all???

S

sargentlard

Save the whales motherfucker
Valued Senior Member
So wandering in my boredom I happen to come upon a movie just playing away on TBS....i believe the title was "Timeshifters"...yes well moving on. This movie presented a very interesting twist on the use of time travel and it presented a excellent moral dilemma on one's concious (is such was possible then ofcourse).

You see the plot went like this

In the future time travel has been invented and been made avaliable for underground commercial use. What the future agencies offer is trips through time to the worst diasters in known history. The vacationers travel back to moments before a diastrous calamities and watch it all unfold for enjoyment and then they are transported back to their time seconds before they can be harmed. That is a option avaliable for thrill seekers. The time travel agencies cause no further damage or create any other diasters for enjoyment...just transportation to the diasters that struck before...i.e sinking of Titanic, burning of the Zepplin etc etc etc.

What I am asking is, is it wrong to travel back in time to gawk at such phenomenons for pleasure? Seeing as how you aren't adding anything to the diasters but merely observing them for pleasure...is it really that bad to get ephermal pleasures out of these diasters? or is that sinful wishing? (for the non-atheists here). I personally see nothing wrong but i wouldn't do it for pleasure per se but out of sheer curiosity...but i guess that is pleasure of sorts.

What do you think?
 
I see nothing wrong with it as long as you're reasobably sure no one extra gets hurt.
 
so these agencys run for the life span of a buisness, and keep sending people back to the same several minuets in history... over the life of thier buisness how many people do they send to this exact point and why wouldnt we in the past realize that any time something catastrophic happens there are vast crouds of gawkers who can not be a counted for? does the movie address this?
 
Originally posted by SpyMoose
so these agencys run for the life span of a buisness, and keep sending people back to the same several minuets in history... over the life of thier buisness how many people do they send to this exact point and why wouldnt we in the past realize that any time something catastrophic happens there are vast crouds of gawkers who can not be a counted for? does the movie address this?
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It is usually one person at a time or a small group....but anyway we aren't focusing on the consequences of these travellers but more on the moral dillema it presents.
 
But if they were all sent back to the exact same moment, even if they were small groups, every single one of them would be there at the time. Every single one.
 
Originally posted by Silivren
But if they were all sent back to the exact same moment, even if they were small groups, every single one of them would be there at the time. Every single one.
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This is not sci-fi people..focus on the question not the details on how they traveled back in time.
 
Originally posted by Persol
It the same as "would you watch an execution on tv?"
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Well i see it this way - On TV it is a mater of switching the channel off or not. You could watch it out of boredom but with this time travel option you are making a concious effort to travel back in time soley for enjoyment out of this destruction, you are paying to see this. Also the moral dilemma that the excution is of a supposed "Evil" man but this destruction involves hundreds and thousands of innocent people who may or maynot be neccessarily evil.
 
True, but in either case, they die. There is no moral problem. (unless they want tv ratings)

Whatever you do, they die.
 
Originally posted by Persol
True, but in either case, they die. There is no moral problem. (unless they want tv ratings)
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Well they would only put it on tv for one reason...ratings. Same as the agency does it for one reason.....money.
 
Originally posted by sargentlard
Well they would only put it on tv for one reason...ratings. Same as the agency does it for one reason.....money.
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Sorry, I wasn't clear enough.... I meant unless the only reason they are being killed is for ratings.

If they are being killed anyway, then who cares if it's on TV. This is ignoring the possibility of them causing executions so they have programming material.
 
I think that it is actually pretty sick to gain any kind of enjoyment from watching another human, or group of human die. It goes back to how degraded our sense of entertainment in todays society is, and it is simply disgusting in my eyes. Dont get me wrong, I watch violence, sex, drug use, etc... all the time on T.V. and in movies, and I do not think that it has any major effect on me, but watching something like that where real people died in the past is a lot different. I hope that people would see the aspect of that type of "entertainment" that is so disgusting, but looking at todays society, I will bet that no one else will see it.
 
Originally posted by altec
I think that it is actually pretty sick to gain any kind of enjoyment from watching another human, or group of human die. It goes back to how degraded our sense of entertainment in todays society is, and it is simply disgusting in my eyes. Dont get me wrong, I watch violence, sex, drug use, etc... all the time on T.V. and in movies, and I do not think that it has any major effect on me, but watching something like that where real people died in the past is a lot different. I hope that people would see the aspect of that type of "entertainment" that is so disgusting, but looking at todays society, I will bet that no one else will see it.
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Yes, something that is comprable to the Roman Collesium. people were killed were amusement there but here they aren't...they just just watched dying for amusement.
 
I don't think that saying it is sick (and I assume you think wrong) is good enough. Please explain why.

What makes watching death that much worse then watching violence? I am not a fan of watching explicit violence/death, but I don't feel that that makes it wrong. We just seem to be running around the issue.
 
When I say that it is sick, I mean that it is wrong in many regards. It is my belief that life is a very precious thing that should not be taken lightly. When you watch explicit violence on T.V. or in movies, you have the coherent understanding that it is purely entertainment, and it didnt really happen, but if you were to go back in history and watch a group of people being killed simply for entertainment reasons, I would hope you would have a very bad reaction to it. I simply cannot fathom how that could be entertainment, and I hope that others feel that way.

I guess what I am saying is that I do not feel that a fantasy is the same thing as watching real people die. When you watch violence in a fantasy realm (i.e. T.V. or Movies) most people can recognize that it is in fact a fantasy realm. When you watch a group of people that are really dying or really have died, you are taking it to a totally different level.
 
I don't think this would be immoral except to the extent that you could prevent the disaster from happening (or limit its effects)

It's the basic idea that if you stand by when you could be helping you're doing a bad thing.
 
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