I dunno. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes right? Don't get me wrong, it's still tragic what happened to most of those people, but I don't have much sympathy.
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Iβm with you. I make fun of people who walk off of cliffs while trying to get that perfect selfie. Individually, itβs very sad. But they were also excessively stupid.
Added to this is that the occupants of the sun are not, on any way, sympathetic individuals. They werenβt doing it to feed their family, or to flee oppression, or to advance scientific knowledge. They were people so rich they paid ten years of normal-people wages for a joyride to look at a ship that is the graveyard from a hundred year old tragedy. And the leader was a fake-it-till-you-make-it slimy, rich businessman who lied about his abilities and contacts and flaunted every regulation put in place to keep people safe.
I also make light of it because my job, as a licensed professional engineer, is to make sure the places people live and work are safe. Safe in a hurricane. Safe in an earthquake. Safe in a blizzard. Safe when theyβre dancing with friends in a nightclub. I see people- businessmen with greater love for money i their pocket then their respect for the lives of others- try and skirt the regulations which are written in the blood of people from our past. I fucking hate people like Stockton Rush because heβs a danger to himself and others and he lies and uses his familyβs amassed wealth to circumvent the very process which attempts to give everyone a fighting chance. I can be sad for the son who was rightfully scared to go, or for the explorer who may have been duped as to the crafts safety but Iβm personally thrilled that Rush is no longer living on this earth and am sad that his death, in particular, may have been painless.
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The way I see it, making jokes about this kind of thing is a fundamentally human reaction. People often react to grim scenarios with humor, consider all the jokes about things like wars that exist- and being trapped in a failing submarine is a pretty grim thought that people might seek to distract themselves from by twisting it into humor. I don't think joking about an event like this that resulted in deaths is the same thing as wishing for people to die, they are, after all, already dead, and uncomfortable as the thought is, the dead are not as far as we can probably know capable of taking offense to anything. There is no possible harm that jokes or anything else can do to them anymore.
Obviously I would consider it pretty rude to joke about it around someone who knew one of the deceased, since you can at least cause emotional distress to those people, but I don't see a problem with joking about it on the general internet.
Another thing to consider is that some of the jokes have been mocking the quality of the sub itself, rather than the people on board (save for the ceo I guess). If you cheap out on stuff and that decision kills people, I think it's perfectly reasonable for people to mock you over it.
We're joking about deaths all the time. The Titanic itself has been used for jokes for decades.
I think the main point of all the jokes in this case is the absurdity of the situation. Like, a bunch of ultimately inconsequential people die in admittedly somewhat weird circumstances and the media seems to go haywire. Nobody should care about this, since it's not more than a weird story for anyone not related to the people. Joking about that is just a way to put the situation into its place, so to speak.
Honestly I do get why it got so much media attention. Media companies exist to make money, to do that they need to get people's attention. Submarines, especially civilian ones that go deep like this, are rare and unusual things, so this story, while of little practical consequence to most, is very good at getting people's interest.
And I hate them for that.
"News" like that is absolutely worthless information, it's just used as a tool to place ads. And for some reason people still click on it? I don't get it. Maybe humans weren't a good idea.
My initial reaction to this comment was to assume you meant you hated the human for falling for the distraction. I was worried at the generalized dehumanization in general, and how difficult that might make meaningful interaction for you in real life.
But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that hating the news corp and it's almost parasitic need to feed on human attention in order to make money wasn't just what you intended, but an interesting way of looking at it. I've had that thought before but never in a conscious way. So thank you for moving that idea into a place where I can more readily interact with it.
It's dark comedy for a tragically comic situation.
By definition, I'd say all of the jokes are in very poor taste, which is what makes them so funny. The specifics of this particular tragedy practically call out for grim comedy: Safety shmafety, Logitech, Blink 182 getting sucked into the spotlight, etc.
I do think that all the chatter about the disaster has underscored some critically important points:
Billionaires are just as stupid as everyone else. They are not exceptional people in any way.
If you're not a deep sea oceanography expert of any sort, you should keep your undersea adventures to much shallower waters.
"Hey Personal Assistant, can you give me the dirt sheet on this submarine company? I'm thinking of visiting the Titanic." Would have saved lives. Those tickets to an undersea adventure were a quarter of a million dollars per seat. I've done better due diligence buying a ukulele online than these halfwits.
I think it's hard to just handwave and say "meme bad". These are some of the people I've come across with it:
First the easy one, edgelords online want to rile people up. I personally don't care, engaging them at all is just encouraging them. There are worse things to make memes about IMO, this is not one of them to get riled up over.
Second, people who genuinely don't care about this and think it's ridiculous the media covered it so much. I'm half in this boat, there are way more newsworthy things to cover than 5 people drowning in a custom made sub on a mission that they literally signed away their life to do. However,
Third, people who see this as a tragedy. The other half of me is here, at least one of the people genuinely wanted to see the Titanic. Which, maybe it's hard for us to understand the price tag, but if you had a dream of seeing it since you were a child, wanted nothing more than to see it, and were offered it, would you? And if not, if someone offered you a trip to see what you wanted to more than anything else in the world, would you want to? Go step on the moon? It's like if someone offered you the ability to literally go to a fictional place, then that 250k doesn't seem so much, if that was your once in a lifetime must do once and exactly once, if you saved up for 20 years. Those are the people I mourn.
Fourth, and I think this is a small group, people who are legit sad but treat humor as a coping mechanism. I think a lot of people forget about them, they aren't trying to make situations like this into something controversial, they just cope differently, and that's okay.
Fifth, people who are sad for the pilot, think the CEO got what was coming to him, and think the loss of three ultra wealthy people isn't actually a loss.
Rich people fucked with the environment and the environment got their revenge
I find myself making fun of the engineering, but I think it's a defense mechanism. I've had a pretty strong interest in the Titanic since I was a kid, and if I were offered the opportunity to see it, I think I'd be more likely to go. And it's scary to think I'd end up on a vessel that wasn't designed to do the thing it advertised it can.
How much did the people who went actually know about the sub they were on? How common is it to sign a waiver about dying to go on a commercial sub?
It's easy to laugh with hindsight, but it's scary to think what could have happened if I were in the position to choose to go.
Well put comment :)
I'm not trying to say that the memes are bad, but I have come across some memes that literally wish some rich people to die and others that cross the line. I fully understand that people don't maybe have sympathy for those who lost their lives, and I get it. I'm not here trying to defend rich people, but wishin for anyone to die or making fun of anyone's loss of life, regarding their background, isn't morally right anymore. Most of memes aren't that harmful but some of them are in the gray. Thanks for your opinion :)
I like the memes. That situation is just so absurd all the way through.
It probably also helps that I don't really have any sympathy for anyone that passed away in that sub. Don't get me wrong: I wish nobody death, but they kinda did that to themselves. They're lucky that they died during the implosion and not by suffocation.
When it comes to tragedies, the number of fucks I give for the victims follows a simple formula.
I start with a billion fucks. Then I subtract the combined net worth of the people affected by the tragedy. The result is how many fucks I give about their tragedy.
For this one, I'm at about negative three billion fucks.
Yeah, fuck them billionaires
Honestly, I just don't care. You don't become a billionaire ethically, and they happened to spend their riches on something so incredibly stupid, when others around the world are suffering because of their existence.
Like yes it's sad for their families and such... But the conversation has revolved around this submarine instead of focusing on, I don't know, that migrant ship that capsized and killed like 500 people.
More so as >300 out of those 500 are believed to be Pakistani nationals trying to flee the worst economic crisis their country has seen in decades while the son of a Pakistani businessman felt compelled to splurge that kind of money on a bonding exercise.
Extreme Bonding in this case.
I do feel sorry for the young one though.
Surprisingly little concern for them. You know, because they're poor and they're immigrants.
I just really don't care about the lives of some billionaires honestly. That company and its CEO were basically just a pile of red flags. Even a cursory amount of research should have turned that up. If they didn't use their billions to cover their asses why should I have sympathy for them? They'd let us all die and wouldn't bat an eye so I'm going to crack some jokes at their expense. Basically I don't think billionaires are covered by our social moral codes because they're at best a bunch of sociopaths.
"Tragedy will be exclusively joked about because my empathy is bumming me out"
-Bo Burnham
Also the only person I feel bad for was the guy's 19 year old son.
Also the only person I feel bad for was the guyβs 19 year old son.
Very emphathic, mr. Child Eater :)
Personally, I think it's all about the balance.
There are a handful of affected families and millions cracking their own jokes. No one (hopefully!) is harassing the victims' families.
Admittedly, my moral perspective is, apparently, a little skewed. I find it mind boggling that we as a culture have normalized sweatshops to make almost everything and children mining and dying to make our phones but draw the line at jokes. Just seems weird, like a plantation slave owner chiding me for saying "damn."
- βNo tolerance for intolerance.β
- βSelf defense is not violence.β
much of it is not aimed against those people personally, but rather voiced as a reminder to others of their ilk that many of us are getting sick and tired of their continued abuses of the system and the people (the difference between setting up a guillotine in front of a parliament building versus mailing death threats to a specific individual)
as long as they continue to see themselves as above humanity by virtue of nothing more than inherited wealth, as long as they claim their wealth gives them the moral high ground, when theyβre willing to spend millions of our money to search for five missing rich people but wonβt spend a cent searching for 750 refugees, then they deserve no tolerance from the rest of us β quid pro quo β¦
Humor about this tragic event is sub-optimal. We don't want to sink this sub with poorly thought out humor.
/c/im19andthisisdeep
I don't want to limit my empathy to people who only meet specific qualifications.
I think jokes and empathy can be somewhat orthogonal. In fact, I think any stable society/org requires a court jester. But dang, the amount of dehumanization, lack of empathy, and sometimes joy, I see is really scary. There are some angry, empty, people on the internet, that I hope to never meet in real life.
I'm on the fence about it. On the one hand, the memes (at least the ones I've seen) were heavily influenced by the article in The Atlantic a week ago about orcas attacking yachts, tapping into the justified vein of resentment against out-of-touch billionaires - a label which can apply to three of those on board the Titan. The fact that these people paid $250,000 each to go down and sit near a shipwreck that they couldn't see (portholes would be a dangerous pressure-point) instead of using that money to actually benefit humanity in a time of widespread hardship is questionable at best - and what does the company they gave this money to spend those millions of dollars on? Obviously not quality-controlled safety tests.
On the other hand, there is the human dimension of the teenage son who was terrified about the trip and only went as a Father's Day bonding experience with his rich dad, or the French naval expert who was genuinely knowledgeable about the Titanic and had recovered many artifacts from the wreck over his life, which represents a genuine loss of expertise.
So I smile when I see the pic of orcas banging pans and saying "billionaires, it's safe to dive now!" But I don't go out of my way to find those memes or exult over the deaths.
I've done it myself, so I clearly have no problem with it myself. Gallows humor is in poor taste, but billionaires don't give a damn about random schlubs like myself, so that indifference is reciprocated.
Plus... plus. It was fucking stupid to take a tiny submarine hundreds of feet underwater to explore a 100 year old sunken relic. The tragedy of the Titanic is well documented! If you want to see it up close, we have remotely controlled drones with cameras for that! Or just watch a damn documentary on the History Channel, on those rare moments when they SHOW history on the History Channel. The sub situation just smacks of senseless, self-destructive hedonism. It's like getting a raccoon for a pet, then lamenting that your new pet just crawled into your child's crib and snacked on her face for a while. Yes. It's a wild animal. This could easily have been anticipated and prevented if you just used some common sense.
Making jokes is how people cope with tragic events.
This is why there is the on-going debate, that no topic should ever be unavailable to joke about.
I remember that the very same day that Princess Diana died, people were saying "Died in a nasty accident" and that was before the days of the internet being popular, that was a joke that spread around the country by text message.
People die. Life is messy. Take it for what it's worth: a good laugh once in a while.
Those dead people are now complete.
They are human, sure. We all are.
I think they don't mind personally.
Felt very poetic reading this. Well put :)
Thank you for caring about safety! I agree with you. I'll add my two cents about Rush: I find it interesting that he must have believed it was safe. I think I take solace that he died doing this, believing his own bullshit. I'd hate to think of him living his life when he sent others knowingly to their grave. If anyone deserved to suffer the consequences of his decisions, it is him.
I think it's risky if you live in the UK. We have a law called the Communications Act which has broad powers banning posting of anything which is 'grossly offensive'. It's entirely up to a court to decide what is 'grossly offensive' on a case-by-case basis.
Whe j think we should have empathy for their families I'm still gonna make jokes.
Did you know on their previous dives the Playlist had plenty of Air Supply.
C'mon dude, we joke about war, cancer and shit
It's fine. We all deal with tragedy in different ways. If my death makes people laugh, I would approve...just please make it far, fast, fast from tomorrow!
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