R.I.P. Nelson Mandela

R.I.P and thank you Mandela! <3

Blimey, that's weird. I actually had the TV on when it happened.

A programme about nuclear submarines, subtitle came up saying BREAKING NEWS ON (Channel X). That is NOT something you want to see in that context.

21:45 GMT on Thursday, that happened. It was 07:30 GMT on Saturday when you posted that. How slow does news travel round your way? :D

@MPen it wasn't that time when I drew the pictures... you're a really smart guy and yet somehow that did not occur to you?

;-p

@Shannon-Akimbojoe --- Sorry, I was assuming that the completion of this game was the "second time it popped up" ... didn't think to check the names under the panels!

@MPen Also, my brain is all numb today, I've had a tiring week, and have chosen tea over coffee to let some of the growing caffiene tolerance drain away.

I think some people don't even know who he is and what he did.
Too bad for them then. He was awesome.

Why's that?

@Shannon-Akimbojoe As in 'Why people don't know him' or 'Why is it too bad' or 'Why was he awesome' ?

@Natural I was asking Taxouck why he doesn't care. Like, does he know about Mandela's life, is it that he didn't know him personally? I opened this page however, forgot to check it, went back to it, replied, and then what whoops there's a post by Natural inbetween!

@Shannon-Akimbojoe I just don't care about other's death, if i didn't knew them personally.

@Taxouck The very least we can do for the people who are brave enough to give up a large percentage of their lives to bring freedom and happiness to others is honor their sacrifices and their passing. 99.9% of the people you'll see mourning never knew him personally, but it's in our interests as a collective society to do what we can to give back.

I'm personally not brave or selfless enough to do anything that comes close to what he has done, and I doubt many really are. It's closer to home for me because I'm part African, but I'm glad he's being lauded as a good person without bringing race into it.

You don't HAVE to care, and I wouldn't personally judge you if you didn't, but you should keep in mind that without Nelson Mandela, life would be a lot worse for many.

R.I.P.

I think it's sad for him to pass away before being able to see the biopic celebrating his life and work (which, interestingly, had its premiere the same evening - it's possible he died even as the film was being shown) and through that get one last feel for how much his endurance and adherance to principle touched and benefitted so many others.

But, it is not a sad event in itself. He was very old, had lived what by any standards was a very hard life, and was seriously ill with a disease that just couldn't be shifted. It would have been nice to see him reach 100, but if someone's on the edge, and is in distress whilst being kept alive, it seems more of a relief to see them finally let go and be at peace. It is still worthy of commemoration, however. One wonders what state SA, or even the world at large, would be in right now without his activism and that of the ANC.

(And yes, I know they did take part in some more violent protest, at least in the earlier days, but that's a discussion for another time, especially given the government's not exactly friendly disposition towards them or anyone who looked a bit too native)

I can sort of see where you're coming from though. It's possible to take things a little too far. When the news was announced, every UK TV and radio station that was either news-focussed, in the middle of a 9pm bulletin already, or about to switch to the 10pm one seemed to hit a big red button marked "ROLLING MANDELA OBITUARY" and /everything/ else was swamped for the next few hours. Everything. Any other story you had any interest in, you had to go and dig out from a side cupboard of the internet. The first half hour of tribute I thought was quite touching and a nice retrospective. The second half hour, I was checking my watch and thinking "OK, good, that's nicely reverent... now, can we find out whether Skegness has been wiped off the map by that once-a-century storm yet?". After that I dropped the volume and left it running, waiting to see when the BRB would auto reset itself and normal service would resume. That sort of thing does little but produce news-fatigue, takes you past the peak of "how awful that this major figure is no longer with us" and into the cynical hinterlands of "alright, cool, we get it, now shut up already". Maybe if it had been a bit more interspersed with the other goings-on of the day (as it has been on here...) it would have retained the impact.

@MPen It's a shame that media is like that, but to be honest it just shows how far greedy people are willing to go. I actually haven't seen any of the stories you're talking about, but I very rarely go through mass media to get access to the news.

I don't personally think the two subjects are connected whatsoever, especially since the same thing happens when anyone semi-famous dies. If it's a story that gets views, they'll just show it over and over and over until it stops making money, which can take quite a long time. Reminds me of Hurricane Katrina, It was still getting coverage on the news a full year after it happened.

@Foffy123 Nah, it's not greed. It's just oversaturation of a particular news story which you would otherwise be quite concerned with to the point where everything else is driven out, and where you actually stop caring about it, like someone nagging you to do a thing you would otherwise have happily done by yourself but you then start to actively resist just to spite them. Psychology is weird like that.

(I think there might be some crossed wires here ... I dunno how, say, the BBC would look to profit from the near-continual repetition of a pre-cooked 25 minute obit, or Sky / ITV would do so from their own blanket coverage (they did at least cut to Zuma and Obama's reactions) seeing that, as far as I could tell, they even suspended showing advertisements during that time. And there's certainly no connection between his death and any of the stories that got bounced, as far as I can tell - but I was hoping to at least get thirty seconds' worth of update on each of the north sea storm and autumn budget stories... There was a bit of a dark joke in the office on friday morning that perhaps George Osbourne orchestrated Mandela's death to divert attention away from his own financial machinations, but couldn't even get that right and timed it four hours late...)

@Foffy123 ... and, to be fair, Katrina is something that is still having aftershocks even now; a year after, things were definitely still in a state of devastation.

But I do see parallels with that in other stories over the last few years, mostly when a major public figure dies. Margaret Thatcher for one, or even Princess Diana (heck, the Express STILL won't let it lie, here, even though there are teenagers leaving school who were born after her death and don't get what the fuss is about).

@MPen Fair point, but I find it hard to believe they're doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. I've participated in some in-home media monitoring programs and such, and as far as I can tell, ratings and views are important regardless of ads or not. I will say that I bet they have no incentive to show the stories you've mentioned rather than Nelson Mandela, since if people don't get the 'breaking news' on the news channel they tune into, they just switch channels. I know the same thing happened with Michael Jackson's death, but I'm really just making blind assumptions at this point.

@MPen Didn't see your second post, but there was just a point where I was sick of seeing Katrina-related stories. It went past the actual devastation and went more into debates over which entities were at fault and lots and lots of speculation. (FEMA, US Army Corps of Engineers, etc.)

I really didn't care about any of the politics behind it, especially not a year later.

@Foffy123 ...ah, true, I think the beeb's governmental (non-license-fee) funding is still reliant on viewer surveys giving them decent market share. Still, it carried on well after midnight, and they do have a free-to-air news station; they could have just said to tune across to that for continue coverage (maybe with a rolling subtitle) rather than doing a simulcast on two different frequencies.

@Foffy123 Suppose they were trying to drum up some public support for improving the response and support systems that are supposed to help protect the US populace from this sort of disaster and which desperately failed to do so at the time? Assuming the very best of intentions that is ;)
(Which I know you can't actually do - I've seen Fox News after all)

@MPen Yeah... I don't know much about media in other countries, but I think everyone knows what FOX News is like. We've got a lot of pretty colorful corporations, so the first thing I think is "Capitalism!" whenever morals and business are mixed.

Hmm, I actually thought it looked way more like Nelson Mandela than most of the other drawings! I think you nailed the eyes, even if they're a little far apart. :3

@Aukoiyou
that's what I thought too, the eyes are indeed far apart. But seriously TikiTiki_Joe's was the best Mandella

@funckygarcon Well, his was the best Madiba, actually, judging by his panel. :3 Also (jokes aside), "Mandela" is how it spelled before someone who actually cares decides to start yelling ... unless there's something I'm not getting X3

Oh gosh O_O