Hey, I have a friend who just sent me a picture of what remains of his mother’s house – an arsonist burned it down the other night.
How about I share a link with you so you can go crack wise about that? I’m sure it will help my friend cope better.
Carte Blanche to say any offensive thing, any time, on the pretext that it’s humour, awesome!
Talk about damning with faint praise.
News flash!! This situation is actually not about you.
You and Tubadiva are getting a bit silly. If you have to start pretending that folks are suggesting that we can say offensive things at **any *****time ***on the pretext of humor, then you should just drop the argument altogether. No one is suggesting that I should walk into a funeral and start making knock knock jokes on the coffin. Why would I want to hurt the loved ones there in that way.
I mean, really. Nevertheless, I have made jokes at my own expense in life and death situations. So, my opinion of what is ok certainly differs from yours. I concede, though, that if dopers are hurt in the dark knight shooting thread, then it is a good idea not to add to their hurt with jokes.
If you have a burning desire to share, go right ahead. Nobody will flame you.
F-
I don’t know why it should be totally different for people who aren’t physically present. You don’t think that people can be shocked by what they see in news coverage, and have similar coping devices?
Which is not to say that shock and coping are behind all such joking, either in person or at a distance. But who are you to rule it out?
In the past, our policy (NOT rule, just common courtesy to other posters) has been that jokes about an individual poster’s tragic situation are not appropriate. “My brother committed suicide last night” is not a thread for jokes. “Someone burned themselves protesting [government policy]” is OK for jokes, so long as the person involved isn’t a close relative of a poster. Suicide bombers (as a general topic) are OK for jokes.
So, our bottom line in the past has always been that we should have some courtesy and respect for other posters. Having said that, we usually haven’t needed to enforce that policy with anything more than a gentle reminder to please respect other posters. We also respect “free speech” and the right of people to act like an insensitive asshole if they want to. Ellen was following our tradition in politely asking people to hold it down for a while.
It seems to me that the “time limit” on jokes in tragic situations is enough time to be reasonably sure that none of our posters is personally affected. Yes, I’m a firm believer in “every man’s death diminishes me,” but the degree of diminishment certainly varies. If one of our posters had a loved one killed or injured in this horror, jokes would be rude, unnecessarily distressing, and irritating (at the least.) It’s not a question of excruciatingly poor taste (although that’s a sub-text), it’s a matter of not being rude and insensitive to other posters.
But absent being told, there’s no way for us to know that until somebody says something. We’re back to a time frame question. Granted if jokes are flying and someone says “hey my sister died” the jokes should move to a different thread (preferably in the Pit). By absent that, is there a rule about how long we should wait to see if someone here was personally affected?
Mostly because it’s a job like any other and after the initial excitement it’s just another day at work.
I don’t have any good arson material but I’ll give it a shot.
Nope. Too late.
mmm
Grading fail.
This sort of thing has been board policy for a while. You did not overstep your authority. People who want gallows humor can open up their own thread where they won’t be offending people. I’ve seen various RIP threads where people making jokes were warned.
There’s been exactly one thread where I’ve seen this stuff accepted, and that was the 9/11 thread, and even there the mods said they’d normally not allow such a thread.
And it’s not a coping mechanism if you found it actually funny. The entire point of a coping mechanism is that it helps you cope. If you had nothing to do with it and just laughed because it was unexpected, you were not using it as a coping mechanism, so that defense is invalid
And, frankly, it’s rather selfish of you to cope with something by cracking jokes to people who have indicated they are offended by such and are already hurting. Just because you are actually using it as a coping mechanism doesn’t mean it’s a good one.
Exactly ONE poster has claimed they used the humor as a coping mechanism. ONE. Every single other reference to ‘coping’ has been made by posters on the other side of the debate. I think it’s time to stop clinging to that to make your point. It’s getting a bit crazy.
How about a dose of sheer honesty. Those making the jokes will admit it has fuck all to do with a coping mechanism and everything to do with just loving to laugh and not finding sensationalistic news stories out of bounds of joke fodder. These same jokers should be sweet and check that all dopers are safe and sound and accounted for before the jokes begin. That may feel a bit weird to us, but it’s a sweet thing to do for a community we care about.
The other side should be honest about their reasoning. If your gripe is honestly that you want to make sure that no dopers have loved ones or are themselves victims of these kinds of events, then that is valid. If your gripe is just that you don’t think gallows humor is ok when the event is still very fresh and new, then you should admit to that and not hide behind the ‘what if dopers know someone who was hurt’ banner. Without that banner to stand behind, you may have to accept that some dopers humor is different from yours and that they may cross you since there are no rules against black humor in those kinds of threads. A dose of raw honesty on both sides can go a long way.
Had to think about this… I’m always a day late and a dollar short.
Ellen Cherry reacted like a human being. From the gut.
Horror is subjective. We perceive it and react to it in different ways.
At the risk of sounding like a cliche (and I’ve already lost some of y’all,) (and what are stereotypes anyway, if not easy-to-point-to examples?)…if you’ve never held/cared for/lost a loved one, you may not want to feel that heaviness of loss.
I understand that oomph! to the belly/I survived! outbreak of laughter. It’s a gift, really. Mostly held by the young. A precious (if that means fleeting) thing.
I don’t begrudge anybody a laugh. I love humor, both dark and white meat. Sometimes I’ve continued to try it even after the music’s stopped, the lights have gone up and it’s time to go home.
Try not to judge those of us who feel the shadows. And we’ll try not to judge those of you who need to laugh.
Knock knock jokes on a coffin? 
I think you’d only do that if your Letter (you might have to have been brought up religious in a southern Christian church to understand this reference) resided at the Westboro Baptist Church. And I don’t believe that’s where you’re coming from.
There’s no particular guidelines except common sense. In most situations, a day seems not unreasonable. I grant you, if some poster did lose a loved one, going to post on a message board would not seem to be a high priority to me. The trick is to balance between respect for our fellow Dopers and allowing people to be tasteless assholes if they wish. A short time frame doesn’t seem unreasonable. Might we find out in two weeks that someone on our boards was tragically affected? Sure. I’m not trying to argue for a perfect system, I’m just trying to ask that we try for reasonable balance.
And please note, we don’t need an exact timeframe if we’re not issuing warnings. We’re just politely asking people to please be considerate for a while.
So, in this as in all things, it’s a matter of individual situations – remembering that our goal is the creation of an online “community” with reasonable degrees of courtesy and respect for each other.
I propose the following unambiguous formula for determining waiting time before jokes:
(log(initial body count) * 20 minutes)
+
((number of babies confirmed dead ^ .5) * 7 minutes)
(distance from USA * 3 minutes)
Is no one going to address the elephant in the room?
Fine I’ll do it! Why, oh why, is the offensive inserted joke, never, ever actually funny? Why is it always lame, lame, lame? Unfailingly, it seems to me.
Even if you believe passionately in the principle, you don’t find it a little coincidental that it’s always unsophisticated, cheap, lame humour, you’re defending?
Uh, so you think you can judge humor on an objective scale? That your analysis of what is funny is the scale that applies to all humans?