I'm not suggesting it's End Times, and of course it's perfectly possible that my outlook is made bleaker by a severer depression than the mild one I thought I had, but it seems to me that people everywhere are becoming more nasty; more aggressive, angry, spiteful, scoffing, avaricious and.. in some cases.. just plain wicked.
I am not talking just about on this forum, just to be clear. I mean people everywhere - in the work environment and recruitment chain, on the TV (factual and dramatic), in the street, in traffic, even in their own families. I have never been a wallflower, nor a saint for that matter, but I am increasingly affected by the insidious rise in nastiness, and I long for people to be good more often.
There are some really nice people here. But this forum is not immune, and it in some way represents a distillation of this tendency - take the "Princess Diana talked after her crash" thread, where so many posters were willing to write such vicious things. I personally don't think we need a royal family, and I strongly believe people should be free to say whatever they want, but I just find the unrelenting childish bile hard to stomach after a while, and wish it could be balanced with a more constructive, at least thought provoking, satire.
― Tongham Hobbs, Tuesday, 30 October 2007 09:39 (eighteen years ago)
I think you're wrong. I suspect that there is far less nastiness and wickedness - which I'd air-quote, but I don't want you to think I'm taking the piss - in most developed countries than there was 100 years ago. I think one's perception of these things is almost completely coloured by yr own mood.
And I think black humour is often a response to the deference and sentimentality that mass media organisations pour all over certain dead celebs.
And manners are nice and often necessary, but not when they're used as a form of passive-aggression, or as a way of neutering people's genuine anger. I still think that manners are often used by those with power to slap down those without. They are frequently a luxury item. It may be an unnecessarily rough old worldout there, but I don't know what you can do other than get in with the cut and thrust or withdraw altogether. People generally angry because they care.
― Noodle Vague, Tuesday, 30 October 2007 09:56 (eighteen years ago)
The Diana thread gives people a punching bag that's not really there - no-one knew Diana, she's at best a concept, and representative of lots of things people have problems with. So jokes at her expense are, basically, just jokes, in the way ones aimed at real ILXors aren't no matter how hilarious they may be.
― Mark C, Tuesday, 30 October 2007 10:36 (eighteen years ago)
if i was going to pick something indicative of the world going to hell in a handcart (which it is obv), it would have to be the exploits of some bored, jaded, officer workers on a thread about princess diana on a message board -- it puts everything else in perspective.
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Tuesday, 30 October 2007 10:46 (eighteen years ago)
I hear that the colliery workers of the day used to zing the death of Leopold, Duke of Albany something rotten.
― Dom Passantino, Tuesday, 30 October 2007 10:48 (eighteen years ago)