June 13, 2017

"The 'administrator' of the sick 'Blue Whale' suicide game has been traced by police back to a Moscow postman."

"Ilya Sidorov, 26, reportedly has confessed to conceiving and creating the social media game that gave youths a series of increasingly risky dares — ending in their own suicides."
Police questioned Sidorov over allegedly instructing a 13-year-old girl in the remote village of Yetkul to jump under a passenger train.... Sidorov allegedly broke down under interrogation...

Philipp Budeikin, 21, is also being held by Russian police, charged with coaxing up to 16 schoolgirls to kill themselves....
Broke down under interrogation... I am not trusting the Russian police, and I do not like seeing American newspapers passing along stories like this in what looks like titillation. This is the New York Post, with this teaser in the sidebar (a still from video you can watch at the link):



Yes, doesn't he look like a "sick mess"? How cute do you think you'd look if you suddenly found yourself arrested by the Russian police? How do you think you would do under interrogation? What's sick is getting off reading articles like this.

22 comments:

Once written, twice... said...

The New York Post is a conservative newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch.

David Begley said...

I don't trust the Russian police or Russian media. I am beginning not to trust the FBI. I haven't trusted the MSM years. Thank you Dems and all of you post modern thinkers.

Left Bank of the Charles said...

A prosecution here doesn't look so ridiculous, does it? And isn't this the plot to the movie Nerve.

rehajm said...

...Or like a whale. Very like a whale.

William said...

In The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe wrote of news photographers who would yell insults at perps. When the perp got angry and snarled something in reply, they would snap his photo and that was the photo that ran in the paper......You seldom see a photo of Trump where he's not in mid snarl. There's a Pulitzer in store for the first photographer who can take an unflattering picture of a Ivanka..

Fernandinande said...

How cute do you think you'd look if you suddenly found yourself arrested by the Russian police?

I look almost exactly like that guy, so pretty darned cute.

Etienne said...

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Broke down under interrogation... I am not trusting the American police.

I hope they water boarded him, and I expect the Russians won't bother to warehouse him like the Americans.

Rae said...

He should change his name to Chelsea. Or doesn't that work in Russia?

tim maguire said...

What are the odds that this game "blue whale" actually exists?

MayBee said...

tim maguire- yeah, this sounds like vodka eyeball shots to me

J. Farmer said...

UK's The Sun had a story on the Blue Whale game a few weeks back, and it claimed that 130 teens in Russia had died from it. This whole story has the whiff of hysteria to it...sort of like that satanic abuse craze that gripped the public's imagination back in the early 1980s.

rhhardin said...

They want a male audience as well as female.

rhhardin said...

Tim Blair quoting Mencken on inducing suicide. I cite the post because the url is unstable as they upgrade (destroy) the site. QUOTE

In 1927, brilliant US columnist H.L. Mencken was held responsible for college student suicides said to have been caused by reading “too much Mencken”.

The then-president of Rutgers University, a Dr John Martin Thomas, led the charge. Then followed the 1920s version of a Twitter hatestorm. You can imagine what might result from a similar accusatory frenzy in Australia today.

Our beloved Press Council would swarm. Leftist sites would run suicide statistics revealing the problem’s extent and linking that problem to the columnist’s obvious evil. The targeted columnist would be vilified until an apology or at least an excuse was offered. You know, all the usual nonsense.

Mencken, however, did not back down. Instead, he wrote this, possibly the finest rebuttal to moralistic groupthink ever published:

I hope no one will be upset and alarmed by the fact that various bishops, college presidents, Rotary lecturers and other such professional damned fools are breaking into print with high-falutin discussions of the alleged wave of student suicides. Such men, it must be manifest, seldom deal with realities. Their whole lives are devoted to inventing bugaboos, and then laying them. Like the news editors, they will tire of this bogus wave after a while, and go yelling after some other phantasm. Meanwhile, the world will go staggering on. Their notions are never to be taken seriously. Their one visible function on earth is to stand as living proofs that education is by no means synonymous with intelligence.

What I’d like to see, if it could be arranged, would be a wave of suicides among college presidents. I’d be delighted to supply the pistols, knives, ropes, poisons and other necessary tools. Going further, I’d be delighted to load the pistols, hone the knives, and tie the hangman’s knots. A college student, leaping uninvited into the arms of God, pleases only himself. But a college president, doing the same thing, would give keen and permanent joy to great multitudes of persons.

n.n said...

Planning and Choices. Choices and Planning.

Peter said...

The NY Post's article (and the embedded video) somehow make me think of the televised hunt of Montag by the mechanical hound in Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451"?

AllenS said...

Broke down under interrogation --

I don't think that the Russians waterboard anyone. When they, and others interrogate you, it will leave a mark.

Greg said...

'What I’d like to see, if it could be arranged, would be a wave of suicides among college presidents. I’d be delighted to supply the pistols, knives, ropes, poisons and other necessary tools. Going further, I’d be delighted to load the pistols, hone the knives, and tie the hangman’s knots. A college student, leaping uninvited into the arms of God, pleases only himself. But a college president, doing the same thing, would give keen and permanent joy to great multitudes of persons.'

Timeless.

Sigivald said...

I'm with J. Farmer - this whole thing reeks of a mostly-or-entirely-fictional moral panic.

Fernandinande said...

The Wiki article says it's an "urban legend" then says it's kinda real, maybe sorta.

Bad Lieutenant said...

AllenS said...
Broke down under interrogation --

I don't think that the Russians waterboard anyone. When they, and others interrogate you, it will leave a mark.

6/13/17, 12:02 PM


And yet curiously the interrogators are never troubled by any repercussions, cases are never thrown out of court, nobody ever suffers, except the (putatively) guilty party.

This is going to make Russia look bad to us, like showing Soviet Russians films of the poor in Harlem (so everyone could see the clothes, shoes, cars, houses, stores of the "poor black underclass") made the US look bad to Russians.

Mary Beth said...

I thought this was the guy behind it - http://metro.co.uk/2017/05/10/man-behind-blue-whale-suicide-game-says-hes-cleansing-society-6627694/ - maybe it was a ring of guys.

Wikipedia calls the Blue Whale game an internet urban legend -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Whale_(game) - but it also lists people who claim to be victims of it.

Anonymous said...

So how is this different from Michelle Carter? Like, only a week ago? Remember?

"Free Michelle Carter.

"This is a ridiculous prosecution."