Liam Neeson admits in interview to wanting to exact revenge for his friends rape - Sensationalist Headlines

yeah who cares about the paths an individual takes to look at their own hate and fix self-destructiveness to become a better human being once a person does a bad they always did a bad and should be branded digitally forever so they can be pigeonholed back into doing the bad

I honestly understand what Neeson's been going through ever since the rape of his friend. Revenge blackens the soul and it's a very easy pit to fall in to. A lot of people do fall for it and get worse off than being lambasted on Twitter. Liam saw what was happening in his mind and he overcome is rage, which is a pretty powerful thing to do in times of great depression. Dude should be praised for his bravery for not enacting his revenge and kill his career faster that what strawmen on social media is doing. I fear what would happen if he did fall down that pit of revenge, and I'm glad he's better for it. People need to spread the word on this story. the FULL THING, not the 3 lines of text that said that the suspect was black.

People that talk about how much mental health issues need to be taken seriously and will immediately discard this story because racism can be implied from a few sentences need to fuck off, it's clear they don't care about people at all. If your message of acceptance and positivity is instantly undone when the dark and unfortunate realities of things like stress and depression make themselves known, it's clear to me you are in it to feel like a good person, not because you are one. I'm actually proud of someone sharing a story like this, it's one of the reasons Terry Crews is a personal hero of mine. As someone with severe bipolar depression and a very muddled past, I see people who are willing to talk about dark things, and admit that darkness can grow in them when others would rather pay lip service to supposedly caring until it gets inconvenient for them as an example of how to move forward.

I like how people make shit like this always about race and nothing else. He clearly stated what his mindset was at the time and that it was rage induced, not race induced. All the people thinking he is/was a racist are stupid. I’m almost certain at the time he didn’t care if the person was; black, white, Hispanic or Asian. He was just looking to exact revenge. (It just so happened that the person who was raped identified the person as being black...) All the people calling him a racist need to hop off their high horse and come back to reality.

I love all these people saying his career should end like they've never felt a rage that overcame them. I think he is extremely brave to have come forward and said exactly how he felt and how it was wrong.

I'm sorry, but this post is what happens when you haven't got a lot of life-experience and somehow think you have the phantom high-ground. The point of the story wasn't that he was transformed into a "nigger-killer!" it was that he was looking for a dude matching the rough likeness. Had he been chinese, he'd look for an asian. had he been white, he'd' probably look for any buff white dude. The story was about rage, powerlessness and how it'll leave you prioritizing payback over moving on. Seriously, the fuck is wrong with you dude? This moral pedantry is just another trope of a sociopath generation born from a culture in constant panic, angst and rage over everything and nothing. America needs to save its own culture before butthurt is all that's left tbh. There's zero point and nothing to be gained from you trying to twist this into some SJW shit. Nothing but drama.

These people speak like they've never felt a rage that overcame them, because they likely never have felt a rage that overcame them. As a general rule, you'll find that the people most offended by something to be those who have the least experience with that something.

It's just people looking for an excuse to shit on anyone who ever did anything that can be construed as racist, it's obvious that none of the people on social media that are calling him racist bothered to read or comprehend anything about what he was saying beyond 'black bastard'.

Some people not liking him anymore means his career is ruined?

If I can add some social and historical context to this which might explain the specificity of his reaction - I'm from Northern Ireland myself. We're a divided society, along the lines of Unionist/Nationalist. If you look historically, during e.g. the Anglo-Irish War, the two communities took part in reprisal killings. These were discriminatory only in that one community had been attacked, so the other retaliated. Doesn't matter who it was, just that they were from that community. There was need to pursue the culprit, all that mattered was that the attack had been committed. This isn't uncommon in contemporary Northern Ireland either, and it was certainly the case during the Troubles. You look at the bombing campaigns by the IRA and other nationalists, or the killings by Loyalist paramilitaries. It's indiscriminate. So, this attitude of being wronged by a particular subgroup within society, then pursuing revenge upon anyone from that subgroup isn't unique to Neeson. In this case, that pervasive attitude that's borne from the division in Northern Ireland's society has been transplanted onto a racial division. It isn't a case of, "I specifically don't like black people now," it's more a reflection of the attitudes that have propagated from the historical context of reprisal killings. I'm sure this isn't a unique problem to Northern Ireland, I just want to highlight that it's a significant component that influences NI's modern divisions. People's mental health problems from the Troubles is also a contributing factor.

It's just mongs with binary brains in action, they only see things in black and white. A shame really, I think Liam Neeson was very brave to admit that he's been angry in the past.

"I AM A MAN WITH A VERY SPECIAL SET OF SKILLS"

https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Culture/video/liam-neeson-discusses-recent-controversial-headlines-60848651 Liam elaborates on his statements.

This hate campaign being led by Piers Morgan is what tops the cake.

To furthur contextualize Liam's position, have you ever had one of those bad days where people doing ordinary or slightly inconvenient things winds you up just a little bit? Like crowding just a bit too close to you on a bus, standing in the isle of a supermarket with their trolley blocking a bit of the isle, walking in front of you just slightly too slowly that they slow you down but you can't overtake them. Inconsiderate drivers, people playing music a bit too loud, the way someone in a meeting talks for ages over something unimportant. All this emotion that you have no channel for, because to go off on any one of these people would be going over the top and part of you wants some rude person to be rude to you specifically so you can have a go at them and be justified for it. Liam wasn't activly looking for a black man to kill, he was full of emotions he had no channel for and was going around in the vauge hope that someone would give him the excuse to act on those emotions. I honestly doubt he would have sparked off at the slightest thing, someone would have had to actually provoke him into doing something, they would have to be this evil persona of a black rapist that he had conjoured in his head of the person who violated one of his loved ones.

I know I'm kind of throwing myself into the lion's den on this one, but I'm really surprised by the hot takes here. By his own admission, he ased for the race of the perpetrator then spent a week hoping to get into a fight with a random person of that race so he could kill them. Thats not brave, thats fucking mental. If he wanted to talk about his past views and his issues with his inner darkness he could have constructed a way better narrative than that, holy shit.

This is what happens when sheltered people decide to become societies moral arbiters. They're incapable of taking the nuances of life into accounts and want to slot everything into nice neat categories with no consideration of the facts surrounding it It's clear he wasn't out to attack random black people and was just after the person who did it because he was so emotionally distraught.

If you watch the video above, he clarifies that race wasn't the only qualifier he looked for. Race is just the most visibly distinctive factor.

So when i take this into account... I'm pretty disappointed that he isn't given the space to get into this. he tries at one point, but she immediately simplifies it down to the American context of it purely being racism and trying to blow the racist moment way up while minimizing the rest. Whatever point he really wanted to make is just shoveled away so America can have one more "racism=bad" moment to not learn a single fucking thing from. He was trying to teach a lesson about retaliation. both primal/personal and culturally and they just ripped the teachable moment out of his hands and shoehorned back into the usual spot. Like, what the fuck would be the harm in it having a broader fucking context than "oh, a black person could have been harmed!" A person was already harmed, for fuck sake and a reaction favoring retaliation would have let to another being harmed regardless of skin color if he hadn't caught himself. That was the whole goddamn point. TL;DR: he's trying to say "be excellent to each other" and they immediately take control and go "you mean be excellent to minorities, right?"! What would be so goddamn wrong with the original message and context being preserved and respected in his message? This fucking pisses me off to no end, somehow. in this case, the neediness and outrage literally detracted from an excellent message. god fucking dammit!

This is a big problem, particularly as America is so culturally pervasive. It artificially induces social roadblocks in other countries where there aren't any. Funnily enough, when the two white ethnic groups in Northern Ireland (British and Irish) are at each other's throats, there's not much time to consider other races! All that matters here is if you are different to me. Doesn't matter how you're different, just that you are different.

The whole fucking country needs a proper fucking sit-down and talking to. From one end to the fucking other. shut down SNL for a month and spend each slot laying this shit out. Over-simplification, sensationalism, hysteria, knee-jerk culture. The fucking alt-right, SJW and emotional fanaticism going on. The shit-sorry fucking state of education, infrastructure and the self-fucking delusion and narcissism on display in any modern social, political and cultural discourse. The whole fucking country is one big brain-bleed from one end to the next. A giant puking misinformation and fabricated outrage faster on a scale that rivals Niagara falls and it's all just a fucking show and dance. That's what this 8 minute clip was. It's what the whole MAGA movement is. It's all that the Tolerance movement boils down to. A fucking hamster-wheel keeping people running in place. from nothing and towards nothing and i'm shit-fucking-tired of it being everywhere. I'm sorry, America, but you need to take your meds and we need some fucking peace. Shut down the fucking superbowl next year and put on a mandatory course in context, respectful discourse and the power of fucking listening and thinking. They need to be so preoccupied about being listened to and start listening. Stop fucking screaming and sit the fuck down. Start finding a middle-ground or fuck right off to poverty and dysfunction. This was what Liam was trying to say. politely. because he lived that shit in the troubles. But what the fuck do we care, America couldn't learn from history if it shat them in the face. They just take the first big theme, in a sound-wall shattering display of "fuck you" levels of disrespect and hold it up as the only point of focus, "oh, it's racism! i'll add it to the collection so everyone can ignore it as usual" Fuck do they care there's a bigger lesson to be learnt here, they got air-pods in. Everything about this outrage is disrespectful as fuck in a way that a parent would usually have to make a fucking child aware of. Fuck, i'm hacked off. I'm sorry for venting like this. But holy fucking shit, is this shit for real anymore?

what's brave is that he admitted the hard, dark truth about what he was feeling instead of building some false narrative that dances around the truth of the matter.

*Sigh* https://i.redd.it/g74a0h70oqe21.jpg

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I really don't find it "brave" to use a movie interview to bring up something like this. He could have absolutely brought up his issues with anger and his frankly disturbing reaction to his friend's admission without mentioning the racial aspect. Theres so much Neeson could have talked about with this. The toxic masculunity of "avenging" victims withour considering what they would want. The fact that his anecdote mentions his bloodlust to the perpetrator, but not his sympathy to the victim. Theres also biases that would lead him to ask the perpetrators race and his desire to pick a fight with anyone of that race. The only things he touches on are the fallout from the Troubles and how revenge is toxic, but that really feels like burying the lead. Finally, let's slow the fuck down for a minute. I'm not calling Neeson as he is now a bigot. He clearly was, at one time a bigot. You dont stew on murder fantasies for a week, directed at someone who just happens to share the same race as someone you've never met without have some inherent bigotry. Its big for Liam to admit this, but it doesn't make that ok. He shouldn't be praised for resisting the urge to murder.

Could you not, dude?

This just illustrates my point about Americanised perceptions of social injustice. Black vs. white. No nuance about ethnicity or other social divisions. Racial division isn't even relevant to Northern Ireland. His planned victim just happened to be black. Same as if it'd been a person from the Protestant community, he'd be saying "Prod bastard," or a person from the Protestant community seeking reprisal against a "Fenian bastard."

You know, I think this is a good example of how other people are thinking about this, and why we're fucked. He brought up a dark, personal story. What about that isn't "brave"? He did so likely recognizing people like yourself would judge him harshly without really taking the time to think about the issue with nuance. He was given a clue to go on, and focused on that. Unfortunately, that clue was the race of the perpetrator. What strikes me as really egregious in many ways is that if the rapist had been white, and Liam had been looking for a "White bastard" to cudgel to death, there would be almost no outrage about this story. Yes, that's a what if, but a well supported one. Neeson DID talk about the toxic masculinity aspects of this, he just did so without literally using the verbiage "Toxic masculinity". What more do you need? He talked about his sympathy, his rage is directly driven FROM that sympathy. How do you not get this? What biases? What would you even be fucking saying if the rapist was alleged to be white? Again, how is that burying the lead? Read the full interview, not just snippets. He ties that all together, you seemed to have skimmed. Yes, lets slow the fuck down for a minute. Because you've lost the entire plot of the novel IMO. Lets break down this last sentiment of nonsense, shall we? You say he definitely was a bigot, because he focused on the race of the perpetrator. Why does this make him a bigot? What would you say if the story was the same, but the alleged rapist was white? How are you claiming expert interior knowledge of how all peoples brains work, and then jumping to bigotry? I need more reasoning than this. No one ever once said that this was okay. What they've said is it's good that he learned from the expeirence, and moved on to become a better person. What you've focused on here is the opposite, and essentially, as far as I'm concerned, shows the "Rush to the bottom" of this stage of identity politics and how it really is just about scoring points by "outing" people. What result this has for society is surely not positive. Okay, so we don't praise him for not doing a bad thing, but we scold him for doing the right thing in the wrong way. Surely this will teach people valuable lessons. Like if you fuck up, never share it, and hide your demons from everyone else because there can be no forgiveness. That's the lesson I truly believe you, and people like you wish to impart. And I think you need to re-evaluate.

What would you guys be saying if he had murdered a black man, though? The opportunity could have easily presented itself at the peak of his rage

That he's a fucking murderer? What's hard to get about this? He didn't do the thing you're acting like he did. We don't judge people on the shit that isn't a part of reality, so why do we need to condemn him as a racist murder when 1) he didn't hurt anyone 2) the accusations of racism are contextual at best and 3) he seemed to have genuinely grown from the situation. it's almost like you would rather just condemn him for the actions he didn't do.