Are these FBriends and FBoFs terrible people?

billvon said:
...it is worthwhile to consider what we consider a newsworthy tragedy.
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Note that this is an ongoing tragedy. I still want to keep updates on current events of the tragedy as it is unfolding. That is a very practical reason for news reporting on it.
 
Anyway, Snoozing the guy wasn't enough for him to take the hint. He doubled down and then tripled down on his 'the teenage sons of oligarchs deserve to die horribly and it makes me giggle' schtick, so I've blocked him. A guy I've known since high school. A guy my current friends that I've known since high school - have known since high school.
 
The unfortunate thing is they probably are dead now. The media, of course, focuses on that 96 hour quote but in reality they probably died a long time ago, we're talking about a 1% possibility that they are still alive, largely because that's the mindset that you have to have if you're part of the rescue process.

If we were simply accessing the probabilities as we do for UFO stories, we would have rejected that 1% change long ago. Sonic buoys were dropped and we can now hear sounds and we hope they are from the submersible but the overwhelming odds are that they are not from that. The Navy analysed those recordings last night and you'll notice that they found nothing conclusive. It's easy to hear sound underwater.

It is true however that this story differs from the 300 drowned people because that story is over and as you said, in a world with 7 billion (?) people, things like this happen often.

I switched my news page to a more focused news source because all I got on Google News was every shooting, every day in every US city and every traffic accident and it's all doom and gloom but it's not really "news". I had to scroll several pages down to get any real news. I'm finding Reuters is much better.

Before mass media, we only read about traffic accidents, for example, in our own town, now every accident in every city in the US is likely to show up on your news page. If you click on one story from LA, now you'll get every story from LA every day and from every other city you click on as well.

It's a skewed perspective. It's also a very skewed perspective, IMO, to call this a rich white guy thing. That's actually a ridiculous conclusion if I'm being honest, IMO.
 
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Tiassa said:
Also, "A good start," is the punch line to an old joke about drowning a hundred lawyers.
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Yeah.

Tiassa said:
What makes this so horrifying is that it is the example you see. And, I suppose, within that, the opportunism of the cruelty. Think of it this way, when the report came in that the flat-earther had died in his rocket launch, everyone I know laughed. But nobody laughed when they watched the video of the failed launch. They laughed right up to the launch, and then stopped because they knew the next thing they were going to see was someone dying.
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Yeah. It's crass to laugh at a dead person; It's monstrous to laugh at a dying person.

Does anyone remember Rob Ford - "Toronto's Crack-Smoking Mayor"? Fuck that guy - what an asshole. I hated him.

But Jesus - not "It's funny that you're in the midst of dying of brain cancer and leaving behind your wife and young children" hatred.)


Tiassa said:
...how are we supposed to feel about the antivaxxer whose wife and child are dead
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As above.

Tiassa said:
Part of what stands out is the question of timing; if we wait until they're dead, how much more acceptable or, at least, less unacceptable, does the joke become?
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I am concluding some non-zero amount.


Tiassa said:
But in all that, there is also the question of whether one is terrible, or is being terrible.
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Part of what you are trying to figure out has to do with how defining the circumstance is. Again, generally terrible, or just being terrible in the moment; the reasons why matter, especially in the case of the latter.
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My verdict was that the distinction does not change the outcome.

The event is toxic to my well-being, here, now. I took steps to remove it from my purview. What happens moving forward is Future Dave's decision; not Present Dave's decision.
 
I think that, often, people on the internet think about strangers they have never met in very abstract terms. Actually, not just on the internet; probably more broadly as well. But the audience for in-person bad-taste jokes tends to be much smaller than the audience for online bad-taste jokes.

The term "oligarch" is a distancing mechanism, in this instance. It acts to "other" the guy who is suffering on the submarine (possibly dead). Think of him not as a person, but as a stereotype, a job description. Forget the real, flesh and blood human being who feels pain and who can be injured and who has a family, just like the rest of us.

It's very easy to judge strangers and their decisions from a safe, comfortable distance away. It is easy to joke about them and laugh about them, knowing that neither they nor the people close to them are likely to come looking for you to ask you to take responsibility for your harsh words and your inappropriate jokes. So, you feel untouchable and you're mean just because you can be. The attention and the affirmation you get from exploiting an another person's misery is worth more to you than any life-or-death struggle the stranger might be experiencing.

This is the dark side of human nature. We don't all give in to this, but its far too common.
 
Seattle said:
It's that something tragic happened vs something is going to happen if we can't act in time. Everyone covered the Thai boys trapped in a cave so it's got nothing to do with being rich and white.
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I did note that the coverage of that event increased significantly once Elon Musk and Vernon Unsworth got into their absurd (and very public) war. Yes, it would have been covered anyway - but not to the same degree.

Let's do a thought experiment. Let's say that boat full of refugees was simply lost, rather than foundering for seven hours within sight of a Coast Guard boat. Do you honestly think it would have gotten the same coverage as the submersible? Even though hundreds, not five, lives were at risk if they were not found?

Now redo that thought experiment with hundreds of cruise ship passengers.
We forget what news is sometimes. It's NPR and Reuters and not something like MSNBC or Fox.
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For me it's generally the BBC and the WSJ. For MOST people in the US, though, it's CNN and FOX and MSNBC. So when talking about media that most people see, those are the ones at issue.
 
So, Stockton Rush (CEO OceanGate) has an account on LinkedIn, and some of the comments are shameful, calling him “arrogant” and a “hippie wanna be.” LinkedIn should remove his page, imo. Think I’ll contact member support and make that suggestion.
 
Well they found a debris field of submersible parts.

So they're all dead.

They are now immune from the jeers of ill-wishers. You are now free to cast wide the gates of mockery.
 
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Even if it was Oceangate’s negligence that led to this catastrophe, it’s absolutely poor form to mock and post hateful comments on the deceased crew’s social media pages. :mad:
 
billvon said:
I did note that the coverage of that event increased significantly once Elon Musk and Vernon Unsworth got into their absurd (and very public) war. Yes, it would have been covered anyway - but not to the same degree.

Let's do a thought experiment. Let's say that boat full of refugees was simply lost, rather than foundering for seven hours within sight of a Coast Guard boat. Do you honestly think it would have gotten the same coverage as the submersible? Even though hundreds, not five, lives were at risk if they were not found?

Now redo that thought experiment with hundreds of cruise ship passengers.
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Redo the thought experiment and use Chilean miners and you get the same coverage.
 
DaveC426913 said:
They are now immune from the jeers of ill-wishers. You are now free to cast wide the gates of mockery.
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And now that it's over, we might wonder that, compared to the absurd tragedies and vicious mockery of everyday life, it's when people mock a bunch of rich people doing something stupid for the prestige of doing something stupid that we've finally had enough of mockery.

It's not just that they were rich. It's that they used that wealth to give a finger to sanity, safety, and self right before doing so got them killed. People are going to notice the coincidence, regardless of how they deal with it the moment.

But I'm also an American, and taking cruel satisfaction really is an everyday thing: Two migrants in a river, or five hundred in the ocean, someone, somewhere, takes satisfaction. I can think back over a decade, when Republicans running for their party's presidential nomination tried to outdo one another on leaving the sick to die, and then on enforcing rape, and remember that people have been taking absurd satisfaction for a long time. Consider the last decade of depravation and infliction, though let's not be snowflakes about it. To some degree, the cruelty is the point.

And people overdoing it on social media when mocking rich people who got themselves killed doing something stupid is the threshold? That's crossing the line, taking it a step too far?

Yeah, strangely, that sounds about right.
 
Seattle said:
Redo the thought experiment and use Chilean miners and you get the same coverage.
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Still, it's a perception of "working-class heroes" contrasted with migrants, refugees, the poor dying/injured/unhealthy in bad neighborhoods, etc. Despite turncoat proles fueling populist waves around the globe, even the old school part of the intelligentsia still habitually regards itself as their patron shepherd. And of course, those of the labor class itself -- those counted among the spectators of these select tragedies -- contingently relate to the misfortunes of other proles (when such is applicable).
_
 
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There has always been a morbid fascination/obsession with watching the elite wealthy, fall from grace.
 
To some it's just another entry into this year's Darwin award. That the people were wealthy, and CEOs or otherwise successful really makes no difference, as Darwin's award is certainly not discriminatory. I.e. it was the apparent stupidity of the company's CEO, his flagrant disregard of safety concerns, that ultimately led to their fate... Or so the argument goes.
 
Sarkus said:
To some it's just another entry into this year's Darwin award. .
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Yes. I am OK with talk like that about dead people.

I am not OK with talk like that about living people who are in the process of dying horribly.

So, a fine yet stark division.
 
DaveC426913 said:
The 19 year-old... He was there with his father. I wonder what mom thinks of the dad's decision to bring junior along...
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Junior was an adult, over the age of 18 and capable of making his own decisions.

I think mom would much prefer if it he hadn't gone with his dad. I think mom would much prefer it if Dad hadn't gone. This is all after the fact - hindsight is always 20/20.
 
DaveC426913 said:
The 19 year-old... He was there with his father. I wonder what mom thinks of the dad's decision to bring junior along...
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The mother was the one who was meant to have gone and the son ended up going to have some time with his father for Father's Day.

DaveC426913 said:
Yes. I am OK with talk like that about dead people.

I am not OK with talk like that about living people who are in the process of dying horribly.
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Why?
 
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