Yep, It’s like compassion is dead. Look at the mother of the kid who got into the gorilla enclosure, getting fucking death threats online, or the parents of the kid who was killed by the alligator. The internet queefed out countless variations of “you should have done something. It’s your fault for not watching your kids. You’re a bad parent. That’d never happen to MY kids.”
Besides making the victims of a tragedy available to every whacko in the world, the internet makes it way too easy for these cruel, judgemental people to find a voice.
Yes, there’s that too, the need to control the situation.
The idea of a seemingly random act of violence like that is terrifying, if anyone can be the victim of that they could be next; in a twisted way, concocting elaborate narratives of vague but nefarious plots to do some evil act makes things seem less scary, the good thing about taking the reins of the narrative of an event is that it gives them some sort of control over it.
It’s also one of the reasons for things like Urbanredneck’s display on the vaxxed thread. For him, having a target to blame for his son’s autism (and one that’s a shapeless blob, one that doesn’t have first and last names, but which has a name) makes it somewhat less scary than accepting that sometimes shit goes and happens and that no parent can protect his child from every single evil thing out there.
There are people who read Biblical admonitions about “the consequences of sin being paid for seven generations” (heavily paraphrased) not as a warning to be careful about the unexpected consequences of your choices, but as an excuse to decide that when anything bad happens to someone (someone who is not themselves or their own child) it’s because their great-great-aunt-by-marriage once looked at the postman with lust in her heart.
It’s a very unhealthy mental mechanism, specially when it’s then used to hurt those who cannot defend themselves.
In the past if you wanted to be a bully you at least had to be big and tough enough to physically hurt someone and risk the chance of running into someone who could take care of themselves. Now all it takes in a keyboard and an internet connection.
Lots of people delude themselves that as long as they are morally upright, the bad things in life will not befall them. Hence victim blaming. However that was always an issue, it is just that now people have an outlet for it.
My Dad died Sunday. The memorial service was today, and our huge family were all alternately laughing and crying all day. Would you say we were acting?
So he’s a “crisis actor” because you don’t believe in his grief, or he doesn’t react in a way believable to you?
Take a minute to think about it _ a full minute. If you’re right, then “truthers” are exposing fraud or political scams or whatever. * But what if you’re wrong?*
If this is just an example of human behavior you don’t understand in the face of tremendous, overwhelming tragedy, then the truthers are attacking a person who just lost a loved one. They’re attacking grieving parents who had to bury a 6 year old child. For absolutely no reason.
I don’t see how any of them can think that their theories make any sense.
They’ve harassed people on the phone and at their homes. That means that it’s known where they live. Surely their neighbors would know that they had a child living with them for years and that child is no longer there. If the child never existed, someone would have said something by now. Do they pay off or threaten entire neighborhoods and extended families? What about school districts, and tax authorities?
They claim that the same people appear in videos of different incidents. Wouldn’t the perpetrators use different people or at least change their appearance (hair color, beards, glasses, makeup, etc.). We’re supposedly talking about a government or group that has almost total control of the media and yet continually makes the same mistakes, even after they’ve been called on it. How does that make any sense?
BTW, this “crisis actor” bullshit has been going on long enough that both Wikipedia and RationalWiki have pages on it. From the latter: “Although “crisis actors” are a real thing used for disaster drills, and there are real companies that supply them, the use by conspiracy theorists is significantly different.[1][2]” From the former:
So Stringbean’s choice of Robbie Parker as an example is not original.
I remember reading about Rosen being harrassed in this way not long after the massacre. And all the dude did was give shelter to some small terrified children who knocked on his door.
I don’t think I’ve ever been to a funeral or memorial service where people didn’t laugh at some point. In another thread I shared the story of my grandmother’s funeral during which her coffin broke open when it dropped to the bottom of the grave and her body (in a shroud, it wasn’t awful) fell partway out. My dad’s cousin looked down and said “She just had to come see what everybody’s making a fuss about”.