I’m pretty sure I figured out a nearly-failsafe test for whether or not someone is a parent: get them to sit down in front of this video, and see if he or she can get through the end of it.
In the utterly non-scientific survey of people in my office, the non-parents were able to watch it, whereas the parents got excruciatingly uncomfortable by about 30 seconds in and had to stop it. Of course, when I extended that survey to some friends online, I found an outlier (a friend without kids who got squirmy and had to stop it around the same time)…
Update: the YouTube vid was killed, so I updated the embedded video above with the copy from LiveLeak (and downloaded a copy of it just in case this happens again!).
ok stop now, I do have kids. Woa very disturbing is the frozen expression on the _dad_ ????
• Posted by: sdevore.myopenid.comHoly crap. Blanched at 22 seconds and stopped it at 42. I have 19-month-old son.
HIS ARMS WILL COME OUT OF HIS SOCKETS! STUPID MAN!
• Posted by: Grant Barrett on Oct 30, 2008, 2:51 PMi don’t have kids and that horrified me. (i got until 1:22 before i had to stop watching me.) That baby’s arm sockets are going to be FUCKED UP. And hello … shaken baby syndrome??
• Posted by: deanna on Oct 30, 2008, 3:27 PMI couldn’t even make it to the one-minute mark.
• Posted by: Dan BudiacOkay, no kids here, but i did make it through the clip. That’s mostly despite the cringing, but because it’s also hysterical.
• Posted by: http://dashes.com/anil/Isn’t there a medical term for dislocating shoulders and elbows in kids which happens pretty often? Like “kid elbow” or something?
I couldn’t watch more than five or ten seconds of it. I’m voting for CGI because I fast forwarded to a minute in and it looked insane/fake to me.
• Posted by: Matt Haughey on Oct 30, 2008, 4:21 PMI watched it for a while - only because I felt it could NOT possibly be real. If I really thought it was real I would have been VERY uncomfortable. Did anyone check the kid for retinal hemorrhages afterward?
• Posted by: Lauren on Oct 30, 2008, 10:41 PMThis looks real, and I’ve seen this sort of thing before. You can tell from the music this is an Eastern European family. In a some East European cultures, they like to toss around babies, they think it toughens them up.
• Posted by: Charles on Oct 31, 2008, 7:35 AMI do note that the guy isn’t pulling the arms that hard, the most violent motions are at the peak of the swing where the baby is essentially in zero gravity.
Horrifying. I can’t believe someone would do this to their child. Ever since the cute “laughing baby” video on YouTube, I’ve seen an increasing number of “hey, look at me and my baby!’ videos like this. Disturbing. Oh hey, check out my babies!! http://flickr.com/photos/jish/2444967568/
• Posted by: Jish on Nov 5, 2008, 7:02 PMUpdate: the father is being charged with “using the internet to access and publish child-abuse material.”
• Posted by: Dan BudiacOops, my bad. The father’s not being charged, the man who re-posted the video is. Which is absurd.
• Posted by: Dan Budiac