End Times Internet Content

I sometimes lurk on far right twitter and you should see the absolute glee they take in hundreds of refugees dying.

I've heard people say the left shouldn't stoop to that kind of thing, "they go low, we go high" sort of thing. But there's no referee and we are being kicked in the balls.

I don't really understand that take, it's not like laughing at rich people die on a submarine is a political tactic, it's just pure schadenfreude. Nothing to do with going low/high.

my primary was looking for information on shelf-stable food, and it turns out the best resources for that information on the internet are prepper sites. they got a video she can watch which will tell her the exact date the coming race war will begin. so that's a good sign.

The far right’s worldview is rooted in hatred, exclusion, and ressentiment.

Hopefully liberals and the left can do better than that.

xp

everything is way more case-by-case basis than is often made out.

you were otm with this imago. most of the comparisons moral objectors have brought up in various threads have been patently ludicrous (torture, capital punishment). I know soref wasn't really comparing this event to 9/11, but even broaching it in this context is kind of ridiculous.

it is amusing that there's this prevailing narrative that comedy is now too timid & woke but it used to be dangerous and taboo-busting and therefore funnier

the submarine stuff is on a different plane of absurdity. It's not even taboo or schadenfreude. Just ridiculous on its face.

I saw someone on twitter compare it to the segway owner dying after accidently driving his segway over a cliff, which feels like an apt comparison, it's an inherently comic situation

I mean 'segway owner' as in the owner of the company that made segways, in the unlikely event anyone here wasn't familiar with this event, not just a guy who owned a segway

idk treesh it seems to me that liberals and the left actually advocate policies that will genuinely help people, not to mention the future of the planet itself, while the right has spent 3 years trying to get as many people killed from Covid as possible and has now pivoted to a political ideology which revolves around crying about trans people and getting mad at beer companies. maybe once the left actually introduces legislation to force billionaires into metal death traps we can talk

there is literally nothing you could say, no attitude you could take, and no amount of hard evidence you could show to encourage these people to get vaccinated. the mindset that we can simply "educate" people out of their harmful views directly led to them transforming their entire personality among the most hateful and ignorant people on the planet. so yeah it's rude to make fun of these people but I wouldn't say it's exactly inappropriate.

― frogbs

frogbs i think we're on the same page here but i think we gotta clarify but what you mean by "these people". like, in terms of herman cain? i think you right, he was actively disseminating false propaganda that left those who believed it at a much greater risk of dying from a preventible disease. is his dying of that same disease _justice_? no, absolutely not, that's not what "justice" looks like. does it help mitigate the risk caused by the propaganda cain and others promoted? yes, it does. again, we're talking about, just like in the other thread, how we assess risk. herman cain is visible, and the people who died for no reason other than that they _believed the lies the republicans told them_ are largely invisible. i had a former co-worker who died of covid, i heard. she was right-wing, fundamentalist, kind of a shitty human being. she didn't deserve to die. she's not responsible for the lies people like herman cain told her. people like herman cain are responsible. they have the power, and it's other people who pay the price.

and if you look at the data, the people who _do_ pay the price, who suffer and die from covid, are disproportionately members of marginalized and subaltern group. funnily enough, even though he was politically powerful, so was herman cain. and for that reason alone, you know, i guess i'm more sympathetic regarding his death than i would be to a lot of other propagandists' deaths. i mean a lot of times the victims and abusers are the same people, right?

yeah thinking about it, herman cain's death is a tragedy, he is a victim. he was also an abuser, he hurt a lot of people in his life, he's not someone i think of as a "good person", but he was a victim. a complicated man, i guess.

I just think people should be nice and not callous assholes

Seems like people use politics as an excuse

I just think people should be nice and not callous assholes

― treeship.

treesh i love you but if i had a sig file this would be in it. it's... seriously, "people should be nice" is not an adequate response to the shit the right is doing right now. we need a little more than "people should be nice" right now.

treeship bawled throughout the opening of Magnolia

I just don’t think laughing at people suffocating to death is meaningfully confronting “the right.” just bc they are rich—doesn’t really seem like it follows

People have always mocked hubris. I don't think it's cruel, I think it's the way the human mind works.

I just don’t think laughing at people suffocating to death is meaningfully confronting “the right.” just bc they are rich—doesn’t really seem like it follows

― treeship.

treesh i know you mean well but judging people who belong to marginalized groups celebrating the deaths of the people trying to kill them as "not being nice" and "using politics as an excuse" is... i think it might benefit you to try and let go of a little of that judgement. i mean yeah people are assholes a lot of the time and do things i don't agree with a lot of the time but their lives aren't mine, they're going through shit i'm not, so i feel like it's best to cut them some slack and, above all, not draw equivalencies between their being "not nice" and the fascists who are trying to kill them. i mean yes. i guess genocide is not a very nice thing to do.

frogbs i think we're on the same page here but i think we gotta clarify but what you mean by "these people".

I'm referring more to the "Herman Cain award" thing on Reddit itself, which is usually a series of 15+ Facebook posts calling Fauci a Nazi, making fun of people who wear masks, accusing the CDC of making shit up, whining that they can't buy horse dewormer anymore, followed later by "please pray for me I'm in the hospital" and then later a GoFundMe for medical costs which is only necessary because the people they gleefully vote for have made it that way. and then the last one confirming they're dead. I mean treeship is right, making fun of these folks won't make them do the right thing, but on the other hand neither will anything else

I used to subscribe to "sorryantivaxxer.com." The thing is, the deaths of most of those people are entirely too predictable, and moreover I just felt bad for them because the vast majority of them are irredeemably stupid.

I saw someone on twitter compare it to the segway owner dying after accidently driving his segway over a cliff, which feels like an apt comparison, it's an inherently comic situation

― he thinks it's chinese money (soref), Friday, June 23, 2023 3:31 PM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yea I think that's kind of it. I mean people made fun of the Crocodile Hunter when he died and everyone fucking loved that guy.

I sense a different kind of thrill people are taking in this but maybe i am wrong

I'm referring more to the "Herman Cain award" thing on Reddit itself, which is usually a series of 15+ Facebook posts calling Fauci a Nazi, making fun of people who wear masks, accusing the CDC of making shit up, whining that they can't buy horse dewormer anymore, followed later by "please pray for me I'm in the hospital" and then later a GoFundMe for medical costs which is only necessary because the people they gleefully vote for have made it that way. and then the last one confirming they're dead. I mean treeship is right, making fun of these folks won't make them do the right thing, but on the other hand neither will anything else

― frogbs

i mean more importantly it's _not our responsibility to fix them_, you know? that's the thing about liberalism is this idea that Everybody Is Our Responsibility and that idea is noble and doesn't fucking work in practice. when someone earns the Herman Cain Award that's not _justice_, that's not "chickens coming home to roost" or whatever, but somebody who promotes ignorance and hatred suffering from the consequences of that ignorance and hatred _themselves_... i can see why someone would want to celebrate that!

And i understand people at times use gallows humor to cope in a world that is hostile to them, a kind of protective measure. I am not disparaging that. But here, couldn’t there also be a little of what man alive noticed — a kind of grim enjoyment of the spectacle, like a gladiator battle? And is this instinct progressive, fundamentally?

The closest experience to that I can remember is the rejoicing that happened after the announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden.

And i understand people at times use gallows humor to cope in a world that is hostile to them, a kind of protective measure. I am not disparaging that. But here, couldn’t there also be a little of what man alive noticed — a kind of grim enjoyment of the spectacle, like a gladiator battle? And is this instinct progressive, fundamentally?

― treeship.

fuck, i don't know, treesh, i'm just trying to stay alive in a world where a lot of institutions of power, and the people who control those institutions of power, are actively trying to exterminate me and people like me, you know? discoursing about what is or isn't "progressive" like i have any real say in the matter isn't a priority for me. like i don't need a grand unified theory to account for people being uncivil, you know?

If clowning on bad billionaire vehicle designs leads to industry regulation, maybe it is part of a progressive tapestry.

Inshallah

treeship. at 9:58 23 Jun 23

And i understand people at times use gallows humor to cope in a world that is hostile to them, a kind of protective measure. I am not disparaging that. But here, couldn’t there also be a little of what man alive noticed — a kind of grim enjoyment of the spectacle, like a gladiator battle? And is this instinct progressive, fundamentally?

does ilx still do the annual death pool? I remember in one of Alan Bennett's LRB diaries he wrote about he met someone who told him they had him in their death pool, and although this guy didn't seem to bear him any malice Bennett still felt depressed imagining the man being pleased when he hears about his death, that kind of put me off them, they just made me think of a crestfallen Alan Bennett. I know some participants would only pick bad people whose deaths they would welcome, but that almost seems worse than approaching it in an amoral spirit

my wife (who for context is not a westerner) often laughs at me for being moralistic (in a progressive way) - she thinks it's down to my Catholic education,

Perhaps this is my hangup. I grew up in a deeply Catholic household but one that was not *at all* conservative. My mom works with migrants helping them prepare their asylum applications. I am not a churchgoer today but growing up my experience of Christianity was, I think, just super different from that of most Americans.

xxp it would have been kind of funny if they still had internet access on the sub and were all sitting there sadly scrolling through the mean tweets as the oxygen ran out

xp the death pool is fucked and ilx is fucked

I "won" the death pool a couple of year ago and felt bad about it, won't play again. think nobody started the thread this year, and no great loss afaic

hi-fives on growing up in a culturally Catholic politically progressive household treesh, I always thank it for making me a "good person" but have to admit it also fucked me up in a load of ways I'm only just becoming aware of.

I was raised Catholic as well, I don't know if that's where this squeamishness come from - the idea that you can judge particular acts as wrong, but to judge a person in total as good or bad is presumptuous and something only God can do? If there's no God then there's no higher authority than us, so it makes no sense to say you're not qualified to judge someone

You don’t judge, just say things like “bless his heart,” or “the Lord loves us all.”

While saying something negative, to sugar the pill, to deflect from the negativity.

no see that's the conservative way, progressive catholics are not allowed to have any bad feelings about anyone, let alone express them

I was raised Catholic as well, I don't know if that's where this squeamishness come from - the idea that you can judge particular acts as wrong, but to judge a person in total as good or bad is presumptuous and something only God can do? If there's no God then there's no higher authority than us, so it makes no sense to say you're not qualified to judge someone

― he thinks it's chinese money (soref)

i think judgement should come from knowledge and experience. for instance i don't really have the knowledge or experience to say whether a submersible design is fundamentally safe or not, so i wouldn't make that judgement!

no see that's the conservative way, progressive catholics are not allowed to have any bad feelings about anyone, let alone express them

― the world is your octopus (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Friday, June 23, 2023 5:53 PM (thirty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes! Love the sinner, hate the sin… but mostly love the sinner. This is how I was raised. I still think this is a good perspective.

Love loves to love love — james joyce. A fellow heretic raised in the jesuit tradition

I understand this makes people cringe uncontrollably.

just imagine ned flanders but into feminism instead of the bible

Ok. No

I do love everyone but I prefer lofi house music and confessional poetry

I do think that pushing all negative thoughts down is probably not a good long term strategy for life, and it's also conditioned me to avoid conflict even if that means fucking things up. so I'm not going to celebrate it.

Hm

you don't push them down, you reify them as confessional poetry, duh

I think it would be somewhat different if, like, the guy used slave labor to build the components for the sub and the laborers killed him in an uprising, or even like deliberately sabotaged the sub so he would die. I'm definitely not saying "they go low we go high," I just don't see any actual political content here. This seems like just enjoying the absurd death of someone we don't like (but let's be honest had never heard of a few weeks ago) for that internet dopamine hit of the moment. Not saying any of you are terrible people if you did that, it just makes me uneasy to indulge in, like maybe I'd just rather not train by brain to seek pleasure from that kind of thing. That's all.

I rejoiced when Scalia died because I thought it meant we'd get a liberal justice on the court (obviously it didn't but that's another matter). I was happy because he had effectively oppressed people and it meant a chance for people to be less oppressed. I don't think there's anything wrong with that type of "enjoyment of death."

And I'll admit it, the segway creator segwaying into death by literally segwaying off a cliff was funny.

xp many people have retirement funds and things wrapped up in all kinds of unethical businesses. Few are not implicated in the violence of wealth extraction. Where is the line where people become “responsible” for it to the point where we dehumanize them?

i mean there isn't a _line_, why do you need there to be a _line_? are you worried that you'll end up on the wrong side of it? i mean i can understand the base fear here. first they came for the billionaires, then they came for the millionaires, then they came for me and there were no billionaires to speak for me or whatever. you're not, though, a temporarily embarrassed billionaire. you're not. i'm just going to assume that everybody here is part of the oppressed underclass and people who think spending $250 million dollars to go underwater in an incredibly poorly designed submersible are not.

i'm not saying that to dehumanize the dead people. they're human beings. i mean what i'm getting here is that you have a hard time thinking of yourself as being fundamentally in solidarity with people who openly celebrate the deaths of other human beings. is that a fair way of putting it?

i think that's a valid concern and a concern worth dealing with. i mean that's what part of an "actual movement for socialism" looks like, it does require _sides_. you gotta be able to advocate for _us_ versus _them_. and yeah that's uncomfortable, that's uncomfortable for me. i'd prefer to think that there is no "us" and "them", but when it comes to issues of systemic justice, i just don't think the evidence supports that. and you can say, you know, a plague on both your houses, and stand where? stand with who? by myself i'm very weak. very vulnerable. i need people i trust.

memes aren't a revolution. memes aren't a substitute for justice, schadenfreude isn't a substitute for justice, but i think memes have a better chance of getting us there than trying to treat everybody equally. someone like, say, f.d. signifier, his voice isn't as powerful as jeff bezos, and to me that's a perversion of justice, his voice should be _more_ powerful than bezos.

i mean in some sense memes are the voice of the unheard. and if wishing violence on billionaires leads to violence against billionaires... to be blunt i'm basically ok with that. because right now, systems of power and the people who control them are inflicting a lot of violence on a lot of people i care about. getting people like, well, not to point fingers but people like _you_ to recognize that is important and it's frustrating and it's really, really hard. and it's not something i have any control over, ultimately. i recognize that. you have control over your own life. i think it would be nice, though, for us to be on the same side, despite any differences we have. because socialist revolution needs a _lot of people_ to support it, it's not something i'm personally going to lead. it's not _my_ revolution.

Kate otm

compared to the condescending platitudes of "thoughts and prayers", to me a lot of the ribbing is the opposite of de-humanizing -- pointing out someone's incongruously absurd cartoon-like behavior doesn't really work without the base assumption that that person is a human being.

and in terms of having a meaningful effect on the world, I'm pretty convinced whatever twitter warriors kept Trump's thumbs busy bloviating instead of on some nuclear football is pretty meaningful!

in line with that, for me the humanizing thing about cracking jokes in this situation is that it highlights the law that "actions matter," a law that many people are flouting today, causing very real damage to a great number of people, species, etc. sure most of us are complicit to an extremely small degree or whatever, but we're all going to need to believe in "actions matter" if we want to believe in ourselves and our future here imo. a billionare paying 250 million to go undersea in a broken tin can is funny, their death is funny, and it feels good to joke about it because the balance there is sooo far off of "actions matter" that it feels good to see the pendulum swing the other way for once, because there is a great amount of energy in the world today being dedicated to making it seem like actions don't matter, that only the market matters. the cynical side here is the one that begs us to keep suspending our belief in actions mattering, to deny the material reality and limits and wealth we all share together.

Good discussion. I am also starting to remember something else I take issue with, a certain prominent strain of religious opinion that it is just as bad to think something or by extension to say something as to do it, and it fact is worse if one is not right with the man upstairs as who among us etc.

And so making fun of the arrogant I Know Better Than the Experts sunk CEO is in fact even more arrogant, DO U SEE?

Every day as Warren G

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0LeL9BUPtA

We might need a thread devoted to making fun of billionaires killed doing risky/dumb shit:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/26/business/james-crown-obit/index.html

Is this a trend? Let's hope so.

Among his many roles, Crown was chairman and CEO of his family business, the investment firm Henry Crown and Company. In addition to serving on the JPMorgan board, he was also a board director at General Dynamics. Crown had served on JPMorgan’s board since the early 1990s.

The longer I ponder this trend, the more I find that I'm agin' it. Billionaires stupidly killing themselves en masse seems like a net positive on the face of it until you consider the billions that will then be siphoned to their Blink*182 fail(step)sons. It's an imperfect world but it can always be imperfect-er.