[QUOTE=Arnold Winkelried]
You’ve got it exactly backwards. When comparing the empathetic response to the humour response, I am not claiming that one method is more constructive than the other, you are. I said that what would be constructive would be taking action concering what you have read (e.g. donating time or money.) What you are saying is that cracking jokes around the water cooler is constructive, expressing pity for the victim or anger at the criminel is not. I disagree. Neiter is “constructive”. Both might help a person feel better about what the horrific event that they’ve read about, but one method is not better than the other.
[/quote]
Correct me if I’m wrong, but earlier in this thread, did you not ask, “Is making jokes about ripping a woman’s eyes out the mark of a well-adjusted individual?” Did you not later elaborate by saying, between someone reacting in horror to a story, and someone reacting with humor, that you’d “give [me] two guesses as to which guy [you], personally, would think is ‘better adjusted’”?
I didn’t say they didn’t take them seriously. I said they were the most likely to joke about them. Joking about a subject doesn’t mean you don’t think it’s a serious issue.
Are you not familiar with the phrase, “Truth is stranger than fiction?”
Me, and the entire theater in which I saw the movie, aparently.
No, I mean that people tend to be more eloquent and verbose in writing than they do in speech, and employ more complex and complicated verbal structures than they would attempt in casual conversation.
Ugh. Who wants Nirvana? I’d rather have a life filled with passion and excitement, and the attendent lows that accompany the highs. If I want to experience the extingishment of self, I’ll eat a bullet.
[QUOTE=Miller]
Correct me if I’m wrong, but earlier in this thread, did you not ask, “Is making jokes about ripping a woman’s eyes out the mark of a well-adjusted individual?”
[/quote]
That was sarcasm, mocking the people that were saying “being outraged by some horrible news story is the mark of a mentally ill person.”
Yes, me personally. But I’m not a mental health professional. I prefer that method but I don’t go so far as saying that people making jokes are crazy psychopaths. This is turning into one of those nitpicking discussions where we go back and forth parsing every word in a post. I’m sorry, but I find those types of discussions incredibly tedious.
Again, not in my experience.
The Nirvana expression was more humour, I’m not a buddhist. In any case, I think I can experience the highs and lows in life without insulting other people.
I don’t really see any point in continuing this conversation, I doubt we are going to see eye to eye. I apologize to the other posters for derailing this thread. There’s another topic in The Pit about a young boy who was sodomized, choked to death and thrown away in a trash bag, you can try practicing your rapier wit over there. If you guys are running out of ideas, I can provide a link to an article in yesterday’s LA Times about a woman who was raped, strangled, and thrown in a dumpster. That’s some good material right there.
I said above “Neither method (empathy vs. joking) is better than the other.” That was in the context of a paragraph discussing “constructive” approaches. My definition of “constructive” in that sentence would have been “doing something that would help someone involved in this tragedy besides myself.”
[QUOTE=Arnold Winkelried]
Both might help a person feel better about what the horrific event that they’ve read about, but one method is not better than the other.
[/quote]
Really? Because your tone here:
…seems to rather contradict that.
That’s nice, but as I explained previously, that was not the sense in which I was using the term “constructive.”
[QUOTE=Miller]
Really? Because your tone here: (hilarious examples not included)
…seems to rather contradict that.
[/quote]
I extend the hand of friendship, and offer you more opportunities for some gut-splitting stand-up comedy, and you throw it back in my face?
[QUOTE=Arnold Winkelried]
I extend the hand of friendship, and offer you more opportunities for some gut-splitting stand-up comedy, and you throw it back in my face?
[/QUOTE]
You might have noticed that, despite my defence of the practice here, I have not actually made any jokes about the maiming of the women in the OP. I prefer the suave, sophisticated elan of joking about my enormous penis. Because I’m all class, baby.
