My curiosity gets the better of me sometimes and I check some of this stuff out every once in a while. Certain things are incredibly tough to watch, other things are more like "wow, I can't believe that just happened!". Things that stick out to me the most (and tend to linger with me for a few days) are execution style murders and beheadings. I've watched two beheading videos in my life, and both of them I was unable to finish. Nick Berg was a 24 year old (my age) either journalist or some hired worker working in Iraq in the beginning of the war. Dude got captured by AQ and was subsequently executed. The video starts with him sitting in an orange jump suit in front of 5 masked men standing behind him, he reads a short message his captors wrote and one guy behind (allegedly al-Zarqawi) pulls out a really big blade, and that's that. Awful. The other one was just as bad, though it didn't stay in my brain like the Berg video did. It was a KID beheading a dude with a really dull pocket knife, a fucking pocket knife! I didn't know a person could bleed that fast...
Just saw a clip yesterday where this dude is tending the front desk at what looks to be a hotel. Guy walks in carrying a bouquet of flowers, is standing maybe 4 feet away from the guy, says "hey, how ya doin'?", the guy pulls out a pistol with a silencer (exactly how you see in the movies) and "cling!", dudes head hits the desk "cling!" guy falls to the ground and the other guy just walks out. Fucking incredible.
I can't help but put myself in the position of whoever is being offed, as if it was me, what would I do, how would I react? The scary answer is always the same, "exactly how the guy in the video did..". Every time I see shit like that it gets my heart racing and I've actually gotten physically nauseous from a few of them..