The Herman Cain Award

not cruel, not funny either, but i have had the time to think about this

by not funny i mean it's like most things that people think are funny. it's a hit NBC sitcom, in the early 2000s, or whenever it was before the new golden age of tv was reborn again.

it's not cruel, at least not if the herman cain award goes to people who deserve it, like herman cain. herman cain went out of his way to promote disinformation that led directly to his own death and who knows how many indirect deaths from people who believed him. he was a public figure, and that's what he used his platform and voice to promote. his family will continue to be reach because he sold pizza, and the world at large will forget about The Herman Cain award soon. A month, a year, whatever. Meanwhile, the people he fooled will still be dead. so, not cruel. not just, either. it's just what occasionally happens to legendary assholes. they tend to have bad reputations that follow them around, until eventually everyone dies and forgets

i will also pledge to never post on this thread again, not because it's good or bad or anything but because i have a tendency to kind of freak out if someone accidentally says something, on this topic. and i don't want to kill your thread frogbs! so i will respectfully bow out and eat some pizza

I'm trying to think of an analog for this, but can only think of those occasional anecdotes where a hunter's dog steps on the rifle and kills his master

not cruel, not funny, just sad

it is not cruel, unless you think it is cruel to hold up a mirror that simply reflects whatever appear before it. these are people who were so cocksure of their position that they mocked others who disagreed with them. this is ugly, not hilarious, but what is cruel here is inherent in the truth of what happened, not in telling that truth.

I do sorta smile at the right wing shock-jock radio hosts who succumb to it, after dispensing such awful advice to their listeners

funny but cruel

I think there's usually a dark irony but you don't have to be a dick about it, but to expand this question if you've done enough harm in the world maybe your loved ones have to deal with that

*jumps back in one last time*

if you've done enough harm in the world maybe your loved ones have to deal with that

otm. when they get to that level of cruelty, inflicting on others, you either stand with them or a seismic change occurs in the relationship. but if you're still there championing the idiotic cause even after it kills your dad, then you absolutely deserve some sort of award that commemorates your blind loyalty to ignorant cruelty

It's OK to have this opinion about someone's death, it's distasteful to say it.

if you poo poo how dangerous something is and then it kills you it's funny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2fKmeFR_ko

I hated Godfather's Pizza as a kid. I didn't touch black olives for years because they slathered them on, in a Cain-esque manner.

Also: my local Godfather's was smoker's heaven in the early '80s.

Occasionally funny, somewhat cruel AND these dumb fuckers deserved it

On the whole black olives are less tasty than green, dunno if this is a controp

it's not cruel, at least not if the herman cain award goes to people who deserve it, like herman cain. herman cain went out of his way to promote disinformation that led directly to his own death and who knows how many indirect deaths from people who believed him. he was a public figure, and that's what he used his platform and voice to promote.

yeah that's kinda where I am, public personas who use their platform to spread information that directly kills people can go to hell for all I care, while say a person who was, say, staunchly anti-helmet laws who wound up cracking their skull open on the highway still feels tragic to me, just because a person does something done doesn't mean they deserve to die. and yet! their ignorance makes everyone else's lives measurably worse!

when it's cops i think it's fair game and funny, if it's like 26 year old shlubs and maga grandmas i lean more towards sad. they just got facebook brain worms. probably shitty people but just idiots who didn't deserve to die.

yeah there's an enormous weaponized disinformation industry that's been working overtime it's not surprising some people fall victim to it

frogbs and harbl get close to my feelings about the point. it seems like the folks gleefully posting this stuff (especially in the subreddit for this) too easily conflate someone who worked in the Trump administration broadcasting misinformation with someone's lonely grandma who shared shitty memes with her 32 FB friends. all misinformation is bad and Facebook is a cancer, but the latter is not the problem that the former is.

yeah cops, talk radio hosts, broadcasters, politicians, anti-mask protest organizers and anyone else with a big and public platform deserve the shaming, but i'm not comfortable with it being turned on random nobodies. then it is just sad.

one thing I've noticed scrolling through these is how they all resemble a horror movie, these people are all the high school cheerleader telling their boyfriend "come on you don't REALLY believe in those dumb stories do you?" just fucking around going "ooooh SPOOKY!!" until it hits them and then you watch them progress real quickly from "I've got it but I feel fine" to "This is actually really bad" to "Please pray for me" to a family member updating everyone on their grisly and lonely death

but most horror movies are set up so you root for the monster, right? that's what makes them fun. schadenfreude is part of human nature I guess. it doesn't feel great but we all remember how these people reacted to the "ICE permanently separating kids from their parents" stories right?

but most horror movies are set up so you root for the monster, right?

COVID is the charismatic villain who gets the Oscar nomination.

sometimes cruel, sometimes funny

Are these somewhat focused covid deaths going to have any actual electoral ramifications or is that just wishful thinking?

wishful until proved otherwise

what type of pizza did you have, Karl?

i'm not really on this thread, but i waited 2 hours, had a horrible bagel with cream cheese and imagined that it was a very special kind of pizza that someone made for me

like an experimental kind of pizza that didn't turn out so well, but you're a friend so you gamely eat it and think about how it is different than normal pizza, in various ways

Like sunflower seeds and chutney or something

I used to enjoy looking at the all pizza parlor ads in the yellow pages as a kid, was always intrigued by Godfathers

It was good but no Rocky Rococo

No one deserves to die this way, even out of their own ignorance/stubbornness. Voted cruel, not funny.

Herman Cain was a clown, but a cheerful one. I have to say it: 9-9-9!

I haven’t looked at the subreddit in a while but last time I checked they only gave the “awards” to the talk radio guys, who IMO deserve no mercy.

(Without looking at the thread, my vote is also cruel, not funny. I understand votes in the other direction--mine probably has as much to do with superstition/bad karma than noble feelings.)

but most horror movies are set up so you root for the monster, right?

i have a long-standing theory that when the monster is the protagonist it's not a horror movie anymore

sure if you cheer for Freddie or Jason knock yourself out but the horror/terror has evaporated by then

not sure how this applies to Rona deniers i wasn't thinking that hard

I don’t feel too bad about the talk radio guy who liked to do hilarious bits listing off AIDS victims. Don’t really want to indulge in mockery of the dead though, and 99% of the content is not actually going to be funny regardless of how much the target deserves it.

when the monster is the protagonist it's not a horror movie anymore

Deathdream might be the exception here

funny but cruel

― mens rea activist (k3vin k.), Wednesday, September 22, 2021 3:13 PM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CmMAIBT3fc

god some of these are grim

https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/comments/psfpjj/joshua_and_brittany_were_antimask_and/

https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/comments/psxt4d/chelsey_another_nurse_who_stood_for_choice/

If people are extending this beyond professional spreaders of misinformation then that's horrible

and yet many of these people are spreading misinformation on social media and likely the virus itself

that nurse just died this morning, btw

fwiw I've heard from anti-vaxx people "I have a friend/cousin/uncle who's a nurse and they say it doesn't affect healthy people/it's treatable with sheep drugs/the vaccine is ineffective and dangerous and they don't tell you, etc etc". who knows how many people they're inadvertently killing

sometimes cruel, sometimes funny

― papal hotwife (milo z), Wednesday, September 22, 2021 2:02 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

not funny but not cruel imo. no sympathy for antivaxxers of any stripe at this point, just makes me unbelievably sad to be trapped with these people on the same planet. ICUs in my area are north of 90% capacity and have started rationing care, meaning that these maniacs are not only killing those they spread to but also innocent people in distress who wont be able to get the care they need for non-covid things. i've always been a cynic with a low opinion of humanity but this experience has made my heart harder than i ever thought it could be. all the needless pain and suffering, the stupidity, everything we've lost, the big things and the small sad ways that simple experience of living life has just been gradually diminished and wicked away, due to nothing other than people who hold the entire world hostage to their selfishness and ego, the utter pointlessness of it all... of all the things to feel bad about, the plight of the antivaxxer dying for lack of a free shot we begged them to take is just not something my heart is expansive enough to find sympathy for right now. maybe i'll get to it at some point but not right now its not in the top 1000.

to be fair to this sub a lot of the top voted posts are "redemptions" (people who got the shot because of the sub) or nurses sharing how heartbreaking it's all been

yeah, it wasn't loading for me yesterday but i looked at it this morning and found it to be a lot tamer than expected

One Eye Open otm.

I'm a member of a few cancer-related groups, and there are numerous stories of people having their possibly life-saving major surgeries delayed due to the influx of Delta patients. The utter stupidity and selfishness of anti-vaxxers makes them extremely difficult to feel sorry for, even if they are victims of misinformation and propaganda.

I wouldn't say they're funny or necessarily cruel. If the existence of an 'award' that mocks people for behaving in an irresponsible and stupid manner that leads to their own death is enough to make even a handful of people mitigate their own behavior lest they be similarly mocked in death, then these things are performing a much needed public service imo. We do probably want to avoid directly shaming and chastising people into vaccinating (because it won't work) but I'm all for like second-order shame and chastisement (see also: blocking them from participation in many of the more pleasant leisure activities responsible people should be able to do without having to worry about being exposed to covidiots).

not funny but not cruel imo

worst response imo lol

In general not funny, but Herman Cain's twitter account still tweeting out covid/mask/denier/conspiracy BS *after he died* was kind of funny.

cruel, not funny. turns my stomach.

did i imagine it or is there a "notable covid deaths" kind of thread on here?

yes, but it isn't designed as a clone of the Darwin Awards

funny's a weird word for it but if I get your drift, then it's funny in that way. Just like the Darwin Awards are.

one more thing I'll say about this is that it's one of the most pure forms of schadenfreude I've ever encountered - to be a leftist in this country has meant a solid half decade of constantly freaking the fuck out upon the realization that half of this nation does not believe in objective reality or science and the knowledge that being governed by these people will inevitably lead to grave consequences, which they straight up do not care about because they know that it "most likely" won't affect them. and all of us screaming at them "YOUR DECISIONS ARE LITERALLY GOING TO CAUSE PEOPLE TO DIE" has only made their resolve to be shitty people even stronger, since they have no clue what suffering a consequence looks like, as this entire country is built from the ground up to cater to and coddle white Christian idiots. in the early days of the pandemic all of these dumbfucks kept saying "so what, I'm youngish and have no chronic conditions, why should I care", and I'm sure tens of thousands of them have unknowingly spread it to someone who suffered greatly from it or died as a result. half of us were trying to do the right thing and punted a full year of our lives (or more!!) but it didn't matter much because the other half were too busy flouting their idiocy by attending giant "Rallies for Freedom" including the Sturgis event which at one point was linked to literally half the active cases in the country. they will never ever admit it but they have so much blood on their hands and the ironic part is most of it is from kindred spirits, not those who their Lord and Savior spent 4 goddamn years calling the "enemies of America". fuck 'em all.

yes this is hitting me hard lately. there was a case at my son's school and while we're all fine (I hope!) the kids' parents are not. the father just died two days ago and the mother is vented up and apparently things are not looking good. they're gonna leave behind 2 kids who are gonna grow up and the only thing they're gonna know about their parents are they were too fucking stupid to get a shot that would have literally saved their lives. that's gonna be their legacy. it's so goddamn sad, and also, almost completely preventable. and I know they were exactly the same sort of people I'd argue with endlessly on fucking Facebook comment sections, trying to plead with them that I am not trying to trick them but they seriously have no goddamn clue what they are talking about. well well well, I told you so.

they're gonna leave behind 2 kids who are gonna grow up and the only thing they're gonna know about their parents are they were too fucking stupid to get a shot that would have literally saved their lives. that's gonna be their legacy.

i'm sorry to have this cynical perspective on this, but i would guess that the kids will "learn" a load of bullshit about what killed their parents and come away with "research" indicating that they did nothing wrong

for example, my dad did nothing wrong, apparently, and that whole side of the family is in complete denial about all of it

I guess if the only relationship you really care about is the one between you and god, and your god demands that you die a horrifying death, then you'll ride that horse all the way to the finish line. it's even sadder how many of these True Believers in Freedom recant on their deathbeds when they finally discover just what kind of fire they were playing with and how useless their precious Freedom looks, compared to staying alive.

maybe, it's hard to say. I can't imagine those kids are gonna grow up to have many memories of their parents and may not be so defensive

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