Rational Dreaming » random thoughts

Going Viral

Rational Dreamer — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 02:22:56 +0000

I’ve been watching, with morbid fascination, a developing news story about a video that shows an Aransas County Court judge beating his daughter for illegally downloading a video game from the Internet.

The seven minute long video was recorded by the daughter, Hillary Adams–who clearly knew what was about to happen to her–back in 2004, but she had always kept it to herself until she uploaded it to YouTube on Thursday of last week (27th Oct 2011), apparently in response to some recent harassment by her father, Judge William Adams.

There it sat on YouTube, virtually unnoticed, until last night (1st Nov), when Hillary herself posted a link to the video on Reddit. (If you want to watch the video, follow the link. It’s too disturbing to embed into this post.) By the time I became aware of it this morning, via a news story on TorrentFreak, it had already garnered over 500,000 views. I suspect it will have been viewed by well over a million people by the end of the day.

It was interesting to see how news of the video spread through the Internet. When I first searched for the story on Google News, there were just a couple of dozen link to reports, most of them in blogs, or at sites that specialize in dredging up the latest viral story to hit the web.

By this time, the Aransas County court house was being bombarded with phone calls, (they put up a notice asking people to stop calling) and within the next hour, some of the local south Texas news outlets–TV station news and newspaper web sites–were hot on the trail. First they were posting short pieces with the barest of information about the video, but soon they were updating their articles with quotes from the daughter, the mother, and then finally the villain of the piece, Judge Adams himself. Corpus Cristi TV station KRIS now has six stories on this one news item alone.

Concurrently, the story was hitting the national and international press. Not surprisingly, the British Daily Mail, which loves juicy stories like this that provoke moral outrage was one of the first, if not the first major newspaper outlet to publish a story about it (the story up there now is very different from the original), but by early afternoon, CNN, the Fox, ABC News, and the rest had all picked it up.

I’m not sure Hillary Adams was expecting to happen, but I suspect she is somewhat astounded by the amount of coverage her video has gained, all in less than a day.

The other interesting thing is, even though Adams provided most of the information people needed to understand the context of the beating incident with the video, that didn’t stop some of the major outlets from getting a few of the more important facts wrong. In some cases she was depicted as a mentally disabled girl, and in others she was disabled. In fact, she’s neither. She suffers from ataxic cerebral palsy which can make it difficult for a sufferer to move in a coordinate fashion, but one quick look at her other uploaded videos shows her to be a bright young woman and an accomplished pianist, so any disability she has is very mild.

There were also a couple of calls for the Child Protective Services to get involved, even though she was 16 at the time the video was made, and that was seven years ago. You do the math. Fortunately for the press, the internet is a very forgiving place and you can quickly send mistakes and glaring inaccuracies down the memory hole, never to be mentioned again.

Another fascinating aspect to the story is how easily people can jump to a very specific conclusion about a family’s history from just one seven minute video. Don’t get me wrong. There is no way to sugarcoat what is shown in the video. There is absolutely no excuse for subjecting any child to the kind of beating and abuse William Adams inflicted on his daughter. I don’t know how illegal his behavior is, but any time you have to raise your hand to a child, it’s because you have failed as a parent.

After clicking on a few links, I came across an old blog that Hillary Adams had written between the age of 19 and 21, and it tells a more complicated story.

You would think that being subjected to such abusive treatment from her father (and this was not the only time) their relationship would be pretty cut and dried, but from reading some of the old entries from her blog, that is definitely not the case. For one, even though her mother tells us that she escaped her abusive marriage, Hillary continued to live with her father after the separation (she was 19 or 20 at the time), and there are several comments about her dad in her blog that any teenage daughter might make — being excited to go with him to Six Flags for the first time, going to buy a car with him, expressing her love for him, and so on. The only hint that all was not well in their relationship is when she’s about to finally moving out of the house (at the age of 20), saying that it is her father’s behavior that has forced the issue. Even then, she tells her friends that he’s been nice to her recently and that she is glad that not to be moving out on such a negative note.

Of course, it is often the case with abusive relationships that the abuser can turn on the charm and everything is sweetness and light for a time, and that might well be the case here, but given the overall content of her journal (i.e. not for parents’ eyes!) I believe Hillary when she said today that she wants her dad to get the help he needs, not to see him punished.

Finally, one does have to wonder about the mindset of a father who clearly doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong, even after all this time:

“She’s mad because I’ve ordered her to bring the car back, in a nutshell, but yeah that’s me, I lost my temper,” Adams told us. “Her mother was there, she wasn’t hurt.. it was a long time ago.. I really don’t want to get into this right now because as you can see my life’s been made very difficult over this child,” Adams continued.

When asked if he felt he was going to face any suspension or discipline from the state over the video Adams responded, “In my mind I have not done anything wrong other than discipline my child when she was caught stealing. I did lose my temper, I’ve apologized.. it looks worse than it is.”

He can bluster all he wants about discipline, but the bolded part of his comment says it all. “This child” is the cause of all his current trouble, and that’s all he cares about.

Fortunately, having had a glimpse into his daughter’s life, she seems to have grown up to be an extremely talented, musical, well-adjusted young woman, with plenty of friends and in a healthy relationship with her boyfriend. She’s definitely a little on the wild side, but she seems to be living life to the full, and that’s what really matters.

Good for her.

Update: I knew she was a smart lass. Here’s a tweet of hers from the day she posted the video on YouTube:

@shoeofallcosmos Hillary

The more I learn about theism, the more atheist I become. #fb

27 Oct via Twitter for iPhone

A World Without Steve Jobs–Better, Worse, or Just Different?

Rational Dreamer — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 20:02:24 +0000

As the world mourns the passing of an undoubted giant in the computer and consumer electronics industry, it seems that everyone has an opinion about the legacy Steve Jobs has left behind. There have been plenty of excellent retrospectives about his career and the impact he made on the industry, but some commenters did get a little carried away:

Everyone’s an Apple guy, whether they know it or not. Home computers, GUIs, the world-wide web, smartphones… would any of these exist now without Jobs? Well, maybe, but certainly not in the form we know them today.

Clearly, this is hyperbole, but the comment did get me thinking. What would a world where Steve Jobs never became the CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation look like?

At one level, of course, we haven’t a clue. The butterfly effect–the idea that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can end up causing a hurricane several weeks later thousands of mile away–implies that even very small differences in events can eventually have a huge effect on the way the future plays out. After all, hundreds of millions of people around the world have used Apple devices. If they had not existed, they would have likely used some other type of phone or computer, but their lives would still have played out differently. Instead of going to the local Apple Store, for example, they would have visited a different outlet. They would have interacted with different people, arrived home at a different time, made different decisions about what to do for the rest of the day, and so on–small differences, yes, but over a period of weeks, months and years, who knows what they would all add up to–the discovery of a cure for cancer, the collapse of the world economy, or perhaps even World War III.

But ignoring this inherent chaotic unpredictability of life that might throw up any number of unexpected world-changing eventa, would a world where Steve Jobs never existed really be that different? I don’t think so. There is no doubt that he, through Apple Computers, played an pivotal role in the early development of personal computers and portable personal electronics, but it’s not as though they had the field all to themselves. Dozens of other companies were getting involved in the personal computing business in the mid-70s, and if Apple had not succeeded, then someone else would have–perhaps Atari, for example, who were the recognized leaders at the time.

The same goes for Apple’s other landmark products, iMac, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, and so on. There is no doubt that their design and introduction to the marketplace had a major impact on the industry, but the trends toward miniaturization, better usability, streaming music, etc. were all going to happen whether or not Apple happened to be one of the driving forces. Someone else would have stepped into the void left by the non-existence of Steve Jobs and Apple.

Therefore, for all the impact Jobs and Apple have had on the world, I suspect that if we were able to take a peek into a representative sample of parallel worlds where there was no Steve Jobs, we would still see people running around with smartphones in their pocket, a tablet under their arm, and a laptop in their bag, listening to music they had downloaded from an online store. Sure, there would be no iPhones, iPads, iMacs, or iTunes, but there would almost certainly be products and services with other names performing the same roles–some worse, some better no doubt.

That’s not to diminish the undoubted accomplishments of Steve Jobs. His vision and drive have helped to shape the world we live in. Without Steve Jobs, the world would be a different place. It just might not be as different a place as many people are saying it would be.

Question of the Day

Rational Dreamer — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 07:00:10 +0000

Every time I see a pastor or an evangelist on TV hawking their latest book, they’re always claiming that it’s the best one they have even written.

So why have I never discovered an author whose books just keep getting better and better?

I mean, if these amateur scribblers find it so easy to improve their craft book after book after book, then why do the professionals have so much trouble?

Summing Up The American Judicial System

Rational Dreamer — Fri, 22 May 2009 05:44:02 +0000

Just saw this in the comments section of another blog:

“If a conservative is a liberal who’s just been mugged, then a liberal is a conservative who’s just been arrested.”

A Question of Truthiness

Rational Dreamer — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 08:29:02 +0000

While we’re on the subject of Stephen Colbert (well, not really)…

Would you rather someone told you the “truth” or told you the “Truth”?

And what’s the difference anyway? Sticking a capital letter on the beginning of the word doesn’t make the truth being referred to any more true. In fact, I usually find that the opposite is true–or should that be True? I get so confused…