No it isn’t. My question is perfectly valid. You just don’t have the balls to answer it.
Before you go any further please see Bryan’s post 76
It appears to me he already said he has no problem with you expressing your opinion as a blanket statement before you joined the thread.
Heh, that’s amusing.
“Who gives a shit” is a perfectly valid answer to “How should Diogenes feel about Susan Atkins’ illness?” I suppose one could expand it to “How should Diogenes feel about anything in particular?” if one was inclined to be dismissive of Diogenes’s feelings in general.
If you must have an alternative, I propose “Diogenes can feel any way he wants about Atkins’ illness, and indeed anyone’s illnesses, including his own. Anyone is free to feel any way they want about Diogenes’s resultant feelings, and he’s free to feel anyway he wants about how they feel he feels, and so on recursively forever.”
I’ll cheerfully agree that the one requirement that Atkins (or whomever is the cancer-ridden subject of the theoretical gloating) not be a member of this board is a sound one, for the simple reason of keeping a lid on the pointless flame wars that would follow.
Thanks.
Wanker.
Good one. 
Well, since everybody seemed to care very deeply how I felt about Tony Snow’s illness I assumed they would care about this one. And since this thread was started to tell people how to feel, I felt justified in asking about it. I missed your answer in post #74, so my apologies.
My question still stands for the OP: is it ok to gloat about Susan Atkins having brain cancer?
Would you do it in front of your daughters?
Already have.
You set a fine example, Diogenes.
Teaching them that serial killers are bad is setting a bad example?
I didn’t post to the Snow thread, myself, but a casual perusal of it looks like you wrote a strident post, then followed up with 73 additional posts in which you:
[ul][li]Defended your original opinion,[/li][li]Explained your original opinion, and/or[/li][li]Said you didn’t care what anyone thought of your original opinion.[/ul][/li]
Personally, I think 15 follow-ups would have sufficed. 30, tops.
No, because if I stopped responding then people would have accused me of running away.
I’m not sure your chosen alternative was better, but so be it.
When the former Shah of Iran was found to have cancer, Ayatollah Khomeini was widely reported as saying, “I hope to God it is true.”
Now, I am not a man of overweening ambitions. I set myself modest goals, if any goals at all. One of those modest goals, however, is this: I would like to be, in general, a better person than Ayatollah Khomeini.
So, as far as I’m concerned, gloating over someone else’s suffering is pretty much out. And it doesn’t really matter who’s doing the suffering. (Heck, the Shah was an oppressive right-wing dictator … does that put the Ayatollah in the right? I think not.)
Your objection is overruled.
Pointing hypocrisy is stupid because everybody is a hypocrite, and whether or not a given person is hypocritical on a given topic has nothing to do with the validity of the poster’s stance on a given topic.
For example, I abhor lies, and I think lying is generally wrong, and I think less of people who lie. I have, however, lied. My being a hypocrite doesn’t make lying good, nor does it invalidate my stance.
It’s just a whiny little bitch thing to do.
I don’t. You see, when I wrote that post I didn’t think anybody would be stupid enough to think I was seriously suggesting that Samclem should have fixed the board. Then I remembered that this is the SDMB, and the bar at times is quite low. That’s why at the end of the post I put in parenthesis a disclaimer about not having the proper facetious/sarcastic smiley to use.
“There,” I thought. “That is so obvious that it will be impossible for somebody to take that post literally. Nobody is that stupid. Anybody close would be such an idiot they would have long since died simply by having forgotten to breathe.”
So, do you have an alarm that reminds you, or what?
The reason why she is spending her life in prison hated and feared by most of society is simply because she is willing to decide who “deserves it.”
You two have something in common.
I dunno. I think it started about seven years ago while I has hating on the Amish and you got all righteous and sanctimonious and started making me feel bad about it until I stopped.
Thanks to you, I no longer speak bad about the Amish.
I just “prank” them in my basement instead
Try again. You can teach your children many things without being a dick, or in your case, maybe not.
Pardon the long post, it could no doubt benefit from editing, but this thought has been simmering in my head since last night and I wanted to put it into words before I went to work. Scylla’s more recent post provides perspective:
Hypocrisy is a term that has been defined down in modern usage. Not everyone is a hypocrite. To simply err is not hypocrisy. Holding a belief but failing to uphold that belief, due to momentary weakness or whatever reason, is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is better defined as espousing a belief that you do not actually hold, i.e. pretending to adhere to a standard you do not adhere to, the better to demand adherence from others.
For example, let’s talk about that big ol’ bugaboo, civility. Suppose someone spends a considerable amount of time being rude to others, generally being a dick, and then turns around and begins sanctimoniously telling others how to behave and begins admonishing others for their rudeness. What are the possible reasons for this change of behaviour? There are at least two:
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The person has had a genuine change of heart, i.e. has emerged from a period of weakness. Not hypocrisy.
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The person has changed methods but not intent. In place of rudeness, the person has simply substituted a club with the word “civility” printed on the side, and is trying to metaphorically beat people over the head with it. That is hypocrisy: demanding that other people adhere to a standard of behaviour not out of belief in the behaviour but simply as a means to selfish ends.
This raises the question: how are we to judge which of the above motives is correct? Some evidence of contrition or remorse regarding past behaviour would push us towards the first explanation, but in the absense of such evidence we would be forced to make a judgement based on our experience with the person’s character. If we truly judge that the person has not fundamentally changed, then that would push us towards the second explanation.
And that is where the accusations of hypocrisy have their place. Not everyone is a hypocrite: the word has a specific meaning, which is more than “I was wrong once but I’m not now.” One can be wrong, one can recognize wrongness in oneself, and one can correct that without exhibiting hypocrisy. Telling people how to behave, without answering the questions “Why should I ascribe moral authority to you in this? Why should I believe in your sincerity, given your actions?”…well, there hypocrisy may lie and it may not. But if hypocrisy lies there, it should be called out.
I guess I’m of two minds on this.
Gloating at others misfortune is certainly not classy, but I don’t know that it’s always unjustified. A year ago my girlfriend’s car was totaled along with the quarter panel of my truck while both were parked in the parking lot. They had been hit by a drunk driver, a friend of my next door neighbor. The mans car was totaled but he escaped on foot. Apparently the man driving was an immigrant living on an Indian reservation, I was told by the officers responding to the call prosecution wasn’t possible. I was denied justice, why is the hope of retribution through karma wrong?