Just look at the posts in this thread to see how many people do see the post as “humor”. @negentropoid is not inventing this.
With respect, might that attitude be somehow connected to a lack of self-esteem?
Don’t move goalposts please. That was about the post and it’s author, and not us here in the peanut gallery.
2 Likes
I’m not playing dumb, fuck you very much.
I am arguing that by mocking this man’s fate we become less human, and I prefer to associate with people who share that attitude.
Who mocked him, where, PLEASE do say. Or keep concern driving trollies, your call. It’s so much classier to use the death YOUR way to make YOUR point then the way you argue the author of the post did (and actually, didn’t do).
Keep staring into that abyss. Bye now, long time community member.
1 Like
Posting the thread at all is going to result in a given percentage of replies that are somewhat callous, simply because the circumstances of this story invite ridicule.
So either posting the OP is a trap for anyone who jumps in to take the piss, or we’re being invited to point and laugh to some extent, right? Pretty sure it’s not the former, since that seems to be the job of threads about hot-button topics for douchebags.
I’m not pretending to be above the only too human comedy/tragedy dichotomy here - I just think it’s interesting to note the inconsistency. Maybe we should be a little less intolerant of folks being humorous yet potentially offensive if we’re not really gonna walk that talk…
2 Likes
Hmm? Oh. Naw, I don’t think so. My self-esteem is healthy enough, and I don’t think I have much chance of ending up in such a position; neither do I really think I deserve such a fate more than anyone else would. Except insofar as me laughing at something like that happening to another human might possibly make me more deserving of such a thing.
It’s more a fate-tempting kinda thing, along the lines of Muphry’s Law.
I’ve brought her up several times before, so I’ll once again wheel out the story of my great-great-great-aunt (or similar distant ancestor), a heavy-set woman who had the misfortune to visit a poorly-maintained outhouse. She broke through the seat, fell into the cesspit, and perished most unceremoniously. A horrible fate, no doubt, and a tragic one as well… but also absurd and undignified and scatalogically hilarious. The best any of us can hope for, since we all die eventually, is a “good” death, one that is relatively painless and peaceful and dignified and not horribly drawn-out or lonely… but few of us indeed can guarantee ourselves such a fate, and if we look around we’re reminded of that uncomfortable fact every day.
I don’t remember the details of Great Aunt Mildred’s fate (and many of them I was never told in the first place; it happened before 1920), so even though I was told she drowned I’d say it’s equally likely she broke her neck on the way down and died relatively instantly. But even though it’s arguably better to die quickly of a broken neck than to spend a few minutes struggling to breathe with your face submerged in human waste, the key thing is that nobody wants to be remembered for dying in a cesspit at all. A century later, nobody in my family so much as remembers her name anymore (my mom did, but she herself died peacefully in her bed in 2013), but we all remember the more unusual circumstance of her death and the utter lack of dignity that surrounded it.
Laughing at such things is a pretty normal, human reaction to such horror. The gender of the outhouse victim doesn’t matter so much to me; it was far removed from me in time, and the circumstance is unusual and grotesque enough that it would be horribly hilarious and unthinkably revolting no matter whom it happened to. The guys falling off the balance beam was a different situation: fourteen old white men, looking for all the world like they’re on vacation, very possibly masters of their domains, conceivably approaching the ends of fairly successful and happy lives, climbing on board that log like gleeful eight-year-olds to show their mastery over the physical realm… and then toppling like God’s own finger flicking flies off His french fries. Funny in a hubristic-downfall kinda way. The comedy wouldn’t have seemed nearly as rich had we seen a line of old women upon that log… and that’s partly because it’s all too easy to assume that fourteen old ladies picked at random would have had more sense than to climb up on that log all at once in the first place.
Hmm. Well, anyway. May we all avoid the cold-cuts-on-our-bare-asses and plummeting-into-cesspits deaths. May we never again hear of such misfortunes occurring in the world.
And may we all recognize what a forlorn hope that is.
12 Likes
Yeah, ummm, I think we can both agree you are not playing dumb.
The tuna-can illustration set the tone of the post, making it jocular rather than, say, a sombre reflection on man’s inhumanity to man (again, imagine the article was about a dead woman, and the picture was of a chorizo). The 20+ posts preceding mine overwhelmingly picked up on that jocular tone (with no intervention from mods BTW). So perhaps you are just a bit tone deaf?
Anyhow, my work here is done. Or something. Goodbye Mr/Ms Clearly-a-Pillar-of-any-Community-to-which-You-Belong.
p.s. On second thoughts I’m not sure you have the stature of a pillar… let’s just say you’re a bit of a pole, eh?
1 Like
I logged on to say exactly this. I had to wade through 30 “this is so funny!” posts before finding one other like-minded soul.
It’s ironic. Cory frequently blasts the British tabloids for their terrible, sensationalist reporting. Then he posts an article like this. He missed the obvious headline: “You can’t believe how a murdered man ended up in a tuna can! Click now to find out how!”
I’m also very sad for everyone else who rushed to make jokes. Does anyone remember Matthew Shepard? Given these comments, it seems that a typical BoingBoing comment might be something like: “Wow! You can’t believe who killed it as a scarecrow for Halloween!”
1 Like
Not all of us get so upset about death. And many people have found humor in the macabre, in fact it’s an entire genre of comedy. So sorry to hear this is so upsetting for you, but frankly I couldn’t give a shit how you feel we “should” respond to this situation. I find your moralizing to be in poor taste, but I don’t expect you to give a shit about that, either.
3 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
