Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/11/20/jim-jones-and-the-peoples-te.html
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Ouch. That is darkly funny on so many levels.
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Expect a cover version by The Brian Jonestown Massacre.
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The company that makes ‘Kool-aid’ must really be tired of the common misconception, by now.
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I imagine it would have been difficult for them to release a post-Jonestown gospel album.
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Are you kidding? Having their product name dropped all the time, even if the context is all wrong, is free advertising. It’s probably worth millions to them.
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Just remember, lamb ranchers are sheeple.
In connotation with brainwashing, cults, and 900 people who died needlessly?
M’kay, if you say so…
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Yes, of course. That all happened decades ago, most people have forgotten or never even knew to begin with. For example, I heard the words Kool Aid first in the figure of speech and didn’t learn about where that actually came from for many years. I wasn’t even born when the massacre happened. So the brand name was introduced to me without negative context, for free. Many people probably had the same experience.
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So strange, hearing and reading this, knowing how far off the rails it would be in just five years.
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The time corrected audio recording of the People’s Temple’s final hour is still one of the most gripping things I have ever listened to. The audio equivalent of a car wreck that you tell yourself not to look at. Trying to follow the mindset of these people from mundane beginnings to horror show group insanity is a fascinating, if futile exercise.
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Though a terrible tragedy, it’s not the Holocaust, yo; it has not passed from living memory. 1978 wasn’t that long ago.
Even though you personally hadn’t been born yet, many other people do still remember, because it’s one of the most horrific instances of mass ‘mind control’ in recent history.
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Well, regardless of how many people still remember there’s been a lot of memetic mutation going on. I mean I live in a country where kool aid isn’t even sold and I know about it. Something is going right for them.
It still matters.
Can you honestly say that you only know about kool-aid because of Jonestown, though?
Y’know what… never mind.
If I’m being completely honest I dont actually care, and it’s way past my lunch time.
You’re right, I’m wrong, end of story.
I’m going to get food now; ciao.
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…we wouldn’t want to besmirch the reputation of the wrong company marketing sugar and food coloring to children. 
if it isn’t brandname™ sugar it isn’t the same.
on a more serious note this event was really tragic, gallows humor is how some process and plays an important yet oft misunderstood role in dealing with tragedy. my sympathy goes out to the families affected even this far after such an event. cults and religions have claimed far too many lives unessarily.
Thread:
Think about it. Think about what really happened that you’re cracking jokes about.
The vast majority of these popular accounts center predominately on Jones, who was white, and the perspectives of white survivors. Each anniversary of the massacre, though, brings a more sober look at how race functioned within the church, like Sikivu Hutchinson’s 2015 novel White Nights, Black Paradise . More than 90 percent of Peoples Temple members were African American.
Then again, it seems it’s always easy to joke about the mass slaughter of black people at the behest of a power-mad white man.¹
¹Yes, this makes me deeply, bitterly angry that kool-aid and lynching jokes are easily dismissed as “just jokes”.
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Nothing is ever “just jokes,” as we both know very well.
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Thank you for saying this. It was a mass murder. Few actually killed themselves willingly.
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