Machinesworking wrote:smutek wrote:
However, I think it is also important to understand that people will react differently - some people may not find some jokes funny, regardless of the content.
Yep, right now neb is posting AIDS jokes on his fun fun friday blog. I've lost three friends to AIDS, but it's nebs right IMO to poke fun at the situation. Somebody else has the right to get pissed at him if they want to. The thing that irks me and probably others, is that 9/11 is considered taboo by many, while other atrocities are OK. AIDS isn't some old thing that's timed out, it's still going on, so it falls outside the whole "too soon" argument.
So ask yourself if you're not putting a certain event into some "holy ground", while others are OK to fuck around with? I think you are, as are a lot of americans.
Sure, fair enough. Poor taste is in the eyes of the beholder. I edited my post saying as much, and maybe a little more.
However, in quoting and responding,
you must have missed the part where I assert that the intent of the original poster had
nothing at all to do with humor, but was instead a deliberate, trolling
provocation.
You see, honestly, if it were Emissary, a long time poster with whom I can not recall ever having a major disagreement, who had made the original post I think I might not have been nearly as extreme and absolutist in my response. I might have thought, yeah, that was in poor taste, and I might have said as much, but probably not in such strong terms.
Not because I feel any differently about the event, but because I probably would not have interpreted the
intent of the statement as having been malicious.
So, truthfully, I think you're mischaracterizing me.
I understand your point about a lot of Americans being painfully aware of their own tragedies yet painfully ignorant of the tragedies of others.
I remember seeing a thread on another message board I frequent about a school shooting here in the States with 7 pages of, justifiably, passionate responses - yet a thread I had posted about American made Israeli jets dropping cluster bombs on densely populated civilian areas in Gaza slipped off of the front page with barely one or two responses.
That sort of thing really burns me up.
The thing that irks
me is that some folks who fancy themselves to be "left of center" think that 9/11 is somehow fair game strictly
because of the existence of these other atrocities, particularly those committed by the United States, and that those who mourn it or want to give it a place in that "holy ground", as you call it, are by extension fair game as well.
Our 9/11 or Chile's 9/11, Qana in 1996 or the Sbarro bombing in 2001, Sabra and Shatila or the Marine barracks in Beirut, Iran Air flight 655 or Pan Am flight 103, the Armenian Holocaust or the Jewish Holocaust - you see to me they are all sacred, they all deserve that "holy ground", and I think I may always find jokes about them in poor taste -
especially when they are made with malicious intent.
That's
my prerogative. Fuck it - I guess I'm just an extremist or something.
