Heh heh heh, yeah, that would have been great.
Holy shitcakes.
On that note, I pit the Tom Cruises of the world.
What the fuck is wrong with you? Smoking takes YEARS off your life!
Whats the big deal, its only a nurse?
So a Jewish father was teaching his son to say grace in 1944 Berlin:
“Today in Germany, the proper form of grace is: ‘Thank God and Hitler’”
“But, what if the fuhrer dies?”, asked the boy.
“Then we just thank God.”
Humor in the Holocaust: Its critical, cohesive, and coping functions.
Ogre, Dseid, I hope you’ve never watched South Park. Or read The Onion for that matter.
Crazyhorse, with all due respect, only a complete moron would think that I meant that sort of Holocaust joke when I mentioned Holocaust jokes, and anyone here who says that these four pages of jokes about dead babies being unloaded with pitchforks are on a par with using black humor as a coping mechanism is completely full of shit.
A certain population laughs at the sort of Holocaust joke that has the punchline “and the rest in the ash tray.” I laughed hard at dead baby jokes once upon a time too. Sometimes humor is based exclusively on being very very inappropriate. People here found an excuse to tell a bunch of that sort of jokes to a group of like-minded people and obviously really don’t give a shit about the actual tragedy. Which is fine. There are message boards full of those jokes. And fart jokes. Yeah and racist jokes too I am sure. A joke thread might be better located somewhere other than the Pit but no less out of the Pit’s official purpose than is serious discussion, and I’m no mod. Go at it and have your fun, and I will occasionally check in to see if there is any real discussion about something that I see as an important subject breaking through. But trying to claim that this now four pages of these sorts of jokes are a means to cope with a tragedy, an alternative to the rending of garments that you’d otherwise be doing … is idiotic. Do you yourself even believe that heaping pile of bullshit yourself?
By the way, that joke is a “Holocaust joke”, like this one is a “Polack joke”:
During the days of Solidarność and the strikes a Polish man from Chicago sent his family in Poland a thousand dollars to help them through the tough times. His family there was nervous, so much money at one time. “We better deposit it in the local bank” said the husband. “What if the bank fails?” his wife asked. “They are guaranteed by the Bank of Gdansk.” “What if they fail?” “They are backed by the Bank of Warsaw.” "What if they fail? “Backed by the Bank of Poland … and before you ask, they are backed by the great Bank of the USSR!” “What if they fail?” “Wouldn’t it be worth a thousand US dollars?!”
You do see the difference, I hope.
Guin, I’ve watched South Park and am a big fan of the Onion. This thread is nothing like either of them. Not at all.
You must have missed some of the best episodes.
With all due respect, only a complete moron would miss the bigger meaning in the message; we use humor as a way to cope. The same way we use grief, and I guess at times outrage. The same way Jews managed to cope with the Holocaust since it was brought up as an example. How and when a given person applies one or the other coping mechanism in any given situation is subjective, as is what level is appropriate or useful.
At the end of the day the baby will still be dead. At the end of the day there is nothing, no single thing, that any one of us could ever feel, say, or do, to change that or prevent it in the future. The mother is an anomaly, a nutcase, looney toons - It isn’t exactly like we need to try to instill more a sense of not throwing babies off of buildings into society in general. We don’t need to worry about offending mothers who have thrown their children off of buildings at one time, but are feeling much better now. I’m not sure who or what it is that those playing the heavy in this thread, trying to remind everyone how sad the murder of an infant is, are actually trying to accomplish.
These jokes in this thread were not being told as a means to cope. People in this thread don’t really give a rat’s ass about this baby’s painful death, the family’s pain, the possibility that the mother had an illness that could have been handled in way that prevented this tragedy, or their own ignorance about postpartum depression let alone postpartum psychosis.* They under no obligation to. They are free to enjoy stupid jokes amongst themselves. And others are free to find it offensive and either say so or not.
But pretending that you make these jokes because it helps you cope? That’s funny.
*If postpartum psychosis, not that much of an anomaly. One or two out of a thousand is far from zero. And making sure that people know the difference between the relatively rare postpartum psychosis and the common postpartum depression is very important. The fact that the “baby killers” had been the ones typically to get on Oprah (until a few celebrities with postpartum depression went public) made new Moms with issues more scared to share their thoughts than a mound of Tom Cruises.
They make jokes, you act like a drama queen. Everyone copes in their own way.
So, now we are accused of being of devils dancing around this baby’s grave? Far be it from there being different values of coping, no, now we are all indifferent, cruel, tasteless monsters. This is terrible.
But wait, before anyone exiles themselves from modern civilization in a Frankenstein-esque act of penance, I shall brace myself and fully empathize with this sad situation. For one minute I shall let the full senseless tragedy wash over me, its full impact hitting me like a drop off a four story building.
checks clock
OK, there. I spent a full, difficult minute thinking about and empathizing with the the fear of the baby, the agony of the mother, the helplessness of the father… Now I feel sad. Very sad. Not to throw the baby out with the bath water, but I think I can say with great confidence that this was truly a senseless tragedy.
And still nobody has answered my question about why can’t the jokes and serious discussion can’t co-exist.
Awesome, thanks!
I’m just surprised no one tried to catch him, because hey, free baby.
I’ve actually suffered from severe postpartum depression, so I know a little about it, thanks so much. I also know what forum we’re in, and that if you want to have a serious discussion about the ramifications of postpartum psychosis, or the societal changes we need to make in order to prevent things like this from happening, you should start a thread about that in some other forum, rather than stamping around and demanding that everyone stop joking and take it seriously, dammit!!! the way Ogre has been doing and the way you are now starting to do.
If you want to have a serious discussion on any of those topics, I guaran-fucking-tee you can have one, right now, if you go post a thoughtful OP in IMHO or MPSIMS or GD or wherever it fits. You are not, however, going to get one in a thread posted by someone who read a news article and then tossed out a couple of lines of RO in the Pit, and I have no idea why you would even expect that.
I already used up my best dead baby joke or I’d throw one in here (joke, not dead baby) to wrap this up (post, not dead baby).
Who wants a free baby? It’d be like ten years before you saw returns on that.
Autolycus,
If you were somehow able to misread my post as accusing you “of being of devils dancing around this baby’s grave” then I apologize for an apparent lack of clarity. No, no such thing is implied. It is just that the claim that you are using black humor to cope with all the pain this causes you is such a steaming pile that I need to call it out. You all enjoy the gross out humor of dead baby jokes and the fact that this humorfest is being triggered off by a recent real tragedy is of no matter. You see no point in discussing the subject, have no interest in it, and feel that Pitting it is a bit well duh, killing baby not good. I may think that such is poor taste but I actually only objected to the wishing that the mother would kill herself soon. I also see the subject of postpartum psychiatric illness as an important one. I have a longstanding interest in promoting screening for it by my fellow pediatricians and yet I personally missed postpartum psychosis in one of my patients’ mothers. It was only later that she revealed to me that she answered my screening questions without revealing to me that she was hearing voices telling her to kill her child and that she had on occasion taken out a knife in response to what they had been telling her and that after our visit she confided to her husband and was promptly admitted and got the proper care. I provided care to that family for many years since and she was a great mother before and after … to me that was a close call and I keep going back over the years wondering if there is anything I can, as a matter of practical routine, do differently to not miss another one.
Of course a joke or two and serious discussion can co-exist, but when a thread has, within a few posts, become a gross joke thread, and none of those joking show any interest in the actual subject matter, then few who are interested in the subject for real will bother to scroll through. It is not “threadshitting” in a Pit thread, because serious discussion has no more right to the thread than do the jokes, but just as threadshitting in GQ or GD thread destroys the serious conversation, the abundance of gross jokes eliminates the potential for other discussion.
MsWhatsit,
One, I have not at any point demand that everyone stop joking. I am merely pointing out that the claim that it is being done to help you poor babies cope is horseshit.
Two, is the Pit the stupid joke forum? No. It is no more that than it is the place designated for serious discussion. A thread of stupid dead baby jokes is not Pitting anything. Truth be told I have often seen meaningful discussion emerge in Pit threads, and have often learned things in them. So while it is not to be expected, it is not too much to hope for it.
Three, at least Ogre was actually Pitting something. His posts belong in this forum. A gross joke thread? Less so.
I’ve no problem admitting that I feel no need to “cope” with any aspect of this story.
FWIW, I completely agree with this.
Look, the topic of postpartum psychosis is actually quite interesting to me and I think a discussion about it on the Dope would be worth reading. However, there is near-zero chance that it is going to happen in a RO pit thread. I respect your personal and professional interest in the topic and am only suggesting that your hopes that this thread would turn around into a worthwhile conversation were not really warranted.
I don’t need to cope. My claim was that there’s nothing for me to do but joke with something so fucking ridiculous as the story linked to in the OP.
By saying “I don’t need to cope” that is actually saying “I am coping quite well, thank you”.
We all have to cope with everything we take in. Saying something is a coping mechanism is not necessarily saying we would otherwise be floored with grief and anguish.
Some may take it in with no humor, but still dispassionately, some may feel terrible grief, some may just elect to enjoy off-color jokes and not join the RO bandwagon. In each case that is just how they cope with the news in the sense that I was using the term. Obviously the comparison to how a holocaust victim ‘coped’ by using humor is in a different arena of coping than how a group of message board readers takes in the news of a tragic murder.
The darkest thing I have seen in this thread, IMHO, was the OP stating they hope the mother commits suicide before she gets deported (and loses her auto insurance!) But that, too, is just how they ‘cope’ with the news.