Comparing one tragedy to another: How to be an Insensitive Buttvomit™ - by june gloom
demagogue on 2/9/2009 at 17:25
I'll stick with my default attitude that any media directed at motivating the masses is bound to be crude and senseless and hardly worth the effort to criticise. Also, it probably doesn't make a difference anyway. People that don't read newspapers and need crude posters to have opinions as a practical matter aren't making important decisions anyway. They may be giving their money to good or dumb causes for the wrong reasons, but you can't be surprised that they do that, or that interest groups know they'll do that and sponsor crap to movtivate it.
I'd save our critical energy for what those groups actually do with the money, the actual decisions being made. That's when you come down with the hammer; that's where the real debate is. All the garbage they package for the public to "particpate" in it is sort of completely unsurprising irrelevant side-dressing. This is just as true for this poster as for the idiocity the US health care "pubic debate" has descended into, or the immigration "debate", or any dozens of other political issues where the public side of it is laughably detached from the reality of what's actually at issue.
Edit: In short, it's all crude demogoguery that deserves no better than to go in one ear and out the other without even bothering to comprehend what point it's trying to make. If you [poster makers] want to make a point, take a few seconds and write it down in a rational sentence that actually makes a point in the real world FFS.
Edit2: Another thing, they should probably make a corollary to Godwin's Law for 9/11. Then you could dismiss the poster in one sentence: "I call Godwin's." Debate over. You lose. There just isn't any point in pushing completely off-topic emotional buttons unless your goal is to circumvent people's reason and get them to do whatever based solely on a moment's rage of indignation, and the point should be automatically disqualified for that reason alone.
Thirith on 2/9/2009 at 17:53
Quote Posted by dethtoll
A tragedy is a tragedy- saying "my tragedy is bigger than yours" just makes you look like an asshole.
Look, dethtoll, in most of this thread you've come across as wanting people to agree with you, and if they don't they're automatically assholes themselves. Are you interested in discussing this or do you just want to vent?
The difference between 9/11 and the tsunami isn't so much that one is bigger than the other. It's that one prompted a disproportionally huge reaction from the western world and had many more billions of dollars thrown at it than the other. At that point saying "Hang on... so many, many more people died in this than in 9/11, yet people and governments ignore it... and we're supposed to be okay with this? Shouldn't the reaction at the very least be of the same magnitude?" is a valid point IMO.
How should that point about proportionality be made in your opinion? Or would you say that it's not a valid point because "a tragedy is a tragedy"? That point only makes any amount of sense if you ignore everything to do with the world's reaction to tragedies and the sense of urgency with which they're addressed (and amount of money thrown at preventing or mitigating such disasters).
june gloom on 8/9/2009 at 02:01
... Wow.
The worst thing is, I was pretty much expecting exactly that.
Shug on 8/9/2009 at 02:59
... do you have an erection, dethtoll?
june gloom on 8/9/2009 at 03:15
I have such an anti-erection it's practically a vagina now.
CCCToad on 8/9/2009 at 03:31
I lol'ed
fett on 8/9/2009 at 03:32
Quote Posted by dethtoll
I have such an anti-erection it's practically a vagina now.
It's always looked like that, you just never noticed it before. Soon your body will begin to go through some changes. You'll start to notice boys more...
june gloom on 8/9/2009 at 03:34
I walked into that one like Queue walks into gay bars.
SubJeff on 8/9/2009 at 08:08
Almost by accident but secretly on purpose?
