Are these FBriends and FBoFs terrible people?

So, at this very moment, the submarine diving to visit the Titanic has gone missing with several passengers. They are deeper than any rescue vessel and cannot be reached by any known technology. They have about 40 hours of air left.

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https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-65953941

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(I am Dave)
Are Dirk, Jesse, Wesley, Sean and Kim all the terrible people I think they are?

I'm asking because I want to understand if my position (of thinking these people are horrible people) is defensible.


I am not above wishing misery upon terrible people - I want Trump to live a long miserable life in jail, so it is quite possible for me to be completely compassionless. But I see these people - who are in the process of experiencing a horrible, lingering death, alone far from humanity - as in a fundamentally different circumstance.

Is it objectively horrible to mock and jeer people - even money-mongering oligarchs - while they are dying?

Or am I being hypocritical to judge my FBriends harshly?

 

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"Very few assets in the world that can go down that deep." Expert says rescue would be complex mission
From CNN's Greg Wallace
https://www.cnn.com/americas/live-news/titanic-submersible-missing-search-06-20-23/index.html

; ; ;



So, they can reach it if it's there and I think that could change things.. As for, Dirk, and the rest, they just could be idiots and not horrible people.

 

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The whole thing is ridiculous. They aren't beyond any known technology. There are a few remote (unmanned) submersibles that could reach them. They might be able to do little once they did reach them but there are options.

More than likely, IMO, they died as soon as communications was lost (given the circumstances that followed thereafter) due to a catastrophic implosion, since it doesn't appear that they surfaced.

It's ridiculous to refer to anyone who makes a lot of money due to a successful business as horrible people just based on that.

Of course it's even more tasteless to do so under the current circumstances.

 

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No they are piss poor and an embarrassment.

I wish that karma was a thing because they would be due it.



Don't know who those people are but they are, to coin the proverbial phrase an embarrassment .

Let us hope they are not suffering.They must have known this was a risky venture.

Who knows what went through or is going through their minds.

 

This is my take. These FBriends are ... ghoulish.

 

Sorry. To whom do you refer? My FBriends? Or the missing crew?

 

The former.I would not be commenting on the character of the crew in any way at this time.

Perhaps they are snagged and a robot sub may be able to nudge them free in time as it seems it is designed to come to the surface by default in an emergency.

 

It's one thing to heap poop on dead people, but another to heap poop on people who are going to die in an accident.

Yeah. The word is ghoulish.

 

Not really. The political left is a respected ideological institution historically grounded in radical social justice, from the French Revolution (aristocracy or class systems are evil) to Marxism (capitalism is evil or the late source of hegemony) to today's motley assemblage of secular do-gooderism cults that obscure their developmental legacy via the intellectual community and soft sciences propaganda slash disinformation machine.

Which is to say, it's no more ridiculous than older, traditionalist sets of principles, concepts, values, and views that humans have invented over the ages (pulled out of either their divinatory, philosophical or scholarly buttocks), and attached an aura of venerated self-importance to that the masses are expected to emotionally revere and behaviorally conform to and regard as above criticism and scrutiny.

_

 

Sounds of banging being detected would suggest otherwise (re: implosion) but time is running out either way.

Re: OP and the "friends" - I find the "joke" to be in very poor taste, and just not funny. They'd be on my ignore list for sure.

However, you asked if it is objectively horrible to mock people while those people are dying, and the fact that some are mocking while presumably not considering themselves horrible should answer that for you.
That's even before considering the wider issue of the subjective or objective nature of morals.

 

If the banging is actually coming from the submersible, sure. If it's just current against the Titanic, not so much. I hope it is them banging though, of course.

 

I don't want to reference a "real" person here, so "Dirk" will be replaced by "Kirk" and purely hypothetical comments of a similar nature revolving around a parallel event on a doppelganger Earth.

Kirk is construing the object of disdain incorrectly. It is the tragedy itself that has garnered "privileged" status, and that would probably still be the case even if the passengers weren't wealthy or renown.

IOW, it's a facet of attention inequality. There are countless individuals potentially dying in unfolding, horrible situations around the world every day, who receive no national or global attention. Because media opportunists don't consider their specific circumstances satisfactorily exploitable enough for one reason or another. (At least immediately, anyway; sometimes formerly ignored incidents can prove profitable down the road.)

And it's completely unsurprising that anyone influenced by collectivist propaganda would associate achieving affluence with having acquired such via the suffering and misery of other humans. That's simply the cognitive apparatus of the left mindset in action, adhering to that underlying philosophy and secular version of morality. But the latter is inherently do-gooder (crusader) oriented and thereby these "poor taste" riddles or opinions are usually excusable, since they arise from the righteous passion of the Good Cause. Whereas the political right or at least far-right is bully oriented -- the inherently evil counterpart of non-religious altruism and social liberation.

One does not even have to be an actual member of the sacred mission to support saving humanity from oppression and privileged sphincters. It can be enough to just be a footloose or volunteer mercenary whose mind has absorbed at least some of the motivating agitprop rotating about in the info sphere. As an extreme example, Kirk could even have a faded swastika on his chest from the old days, but clearly he would be redeeming himself now by promoting the light and condemning the vile rich (capitalists).

Since again there is opportunistic bias involved in singling out rare, spectacular, or special dramatic misfortunes for worldwide focus -- Kirk was probably subtly mocking that aspect as well. As if saying to us: "Why are you manipulated, ruminant imbeciles attracted to this kind of privileged sensationalism? When misadventures of oppressed population groups and the poor occur all around us -- but are only noticed by local journalism at best."
_

 

Dirk is short for "Dirk Gently", so pseudonymization has been baked-in.

 

Yes. I agree, in the grander scheme, lots of people are dying.

What's troubling me is these people are dying very immediately (less than 24 hours now), horribly, helplessly and very, very alone.
It would be terrible to die in a war, or of dysentery or starvation, but those things don't make me personally sweat into my bedsheets the moment I start to think about them. Dying of oxygen starvation in a submersible over 4 days does. That is definitely some very personal attention inequality.

And one of those victims is a 19 year old lad.

"Giggling with glee" as Dirk has put it, is monstrous.

 

I think when you stop to consider the stations of irony, and also the fact that you're describing social media interaction, there's more to it.

Also, "A good start," is the punch line to an old joke about drowning a hundred lawyers. And, sure, people are being insensitive, even extraordinarily so, because that's how social media works.

What makes this so horrifying is that it is the example you see. And, I suppose, within that, the opportunism of the cruelty. Think of it this way, when the report came in that the flat-earther had died in his rocket launch, everyone I know laughed. But nobody laughed when they watched the video of the failed launch. They laughed right up to the launch, and then stopped because they knew the next thing they were going to see was someone dying.

But that's still a different question, in its way. Would it make that much of a difference if the system, rated to 1300 meters, failed entirely at 2000, and they all died then? I remember people laughing when we lost Challenger. When the question arose whether anyone survived the initial blast, they laughed harder.

Here's an obscure question: When they joke, are they leading or following? Are they establishing a joke or even outlook, or simply contributing their two cents?

And then think both forward and back. Today, and possibly for the next remainder of a lifetime, there is someone alive who is suffering both in body and mind, and how are we supposed to feel about the antivaxxer whose wife and child are dead, and whose long Covid symptoms are picked up on the public tab? Put that way, it's kind of a rough suggestion, but compared to the history that precedes, looking at that person's living misery and taking satisfaction in the idea that he did it to himself is an easy, even attractive behavior that entire cultures are conditioned by praxis to appreciate, seek, and pursue.

I also think it's important to note on the use of the word, "oligarchs", but that can wait; I can't tell if they're trying to vilify idiots or humanize oligarchs. It's not quite a Poe's Law thing, but the word comes up in a twit-trend that we're not going to understand until later.

Consider the idea that nobody has a solid definition of what art is, but most can tell you what isn't, i.e., what doesn't meet their undefined standard. Part of what stands out is the question of timing; if we wait until they're dead, how much more acceptable or, at least, less unacceptable, does the joke become? Was it a quick death, or slow and fearful and agonizing, and to what degree does this change how we feel about the joke? Does the use of the word "oligarchs" license cruel satisfaction? Is the use of the word "oligarchs" actually appropriate? It is harder to affirmatively describe the appropriate range than to identify and disqualify what is inappropriate. What is an acceptable joke? Most won't set that boundary affirmatively, because they know their criteria will fail. But they will, meanwhile, tell you what is not acceptable.

But in all that, there is also the question of whether one is terrible, or is being terrible. It's a distinction far too forgetten in general, and even easier to overlook online.

Part of what you are trying to figure out has to do with how defining the circumstance is. Again, generally terrible, or just being terrible in the moment; the reasons why matter, especially in the case of the latter.

And you would know these people better than the rest of us. Monstrous, mayhaps, but what are the particular implications vis à vis these individuals. Part of me wants to suggest that a coincidence of factors makes this particular iteration of common behavior seem particularly monstrous, as such, but that also suggests a valence of mundane monstrosity, and that discussion becomes its own messy monster.

Spoiler

​

 

What is slightly troubling to me is that at least 300 people died two days ago - and that included at least dozens of young kids. They died immediately, horribly and helplessly as the boat they were on capsized, in one of the worst marine disasters in the Mediterranean ever. But few, if any, news services covered that on their front page.

Perhaps that was because they were indigent refugees from the Middle East, and thus not as newsworthy as rich white people to a mostly-white audience. Perhaps that was because refugees die all the time, and rich people on expeditions don't. Perhaps that was because "boy trapped in well" is more of a spectacle (and thus more newsworthy) than "boy dies falling into well." Most likely it's a combination of all three.

Neither one is funny, and both are sad. But it is worthwhile to consider what we consider a newsworthy tragedy.

 

Hmm, well…it’s social media, where many people become braver and post all kinds of hurtful garbage, that they’d never say to an oligarch’s face. Let alone anyone’s else’s face. All for “likes.”

I’d unfriend them.

That said, I find it hauntingly disturbing that OceanGate fired two employees who warned of the safety problems with this submersible. Why would they ignore that and still take people on tours?

 

This deserves 1000 likes.

 

I

It's that something tragic happened vs something is going to happen if we can't act in time. Everyone covered the Thai boys trapped in a cave so it's got nothing to do with being rich and white.

My news page is Reuters. The capsized boat was front page. It isn't likely to be the top story on any of the editorializing news entertainment pages. We forget what news is sometimes. It's NPR and Reuters and not something like MSNBC or Fox.

 

Yes, I read this in the news. I experienced sadness about it.

But it highlights a point I'm trying to grapple with in this thread.

People die all the time. Children die all the time. I experience pain when that happens, but it passes. Thing is, once they're dead. Nothing can be done for them and they won't hear it anyway. It's all over but the grieving of the living. (And six months from now, they will be part of some comedian's dark comedy routine. As the saying goes "Comedy Is Tragedy Plus Time" Cynical, but it's life and it moves on.)

These five people are not dead yet. They are still in the process of dying. Horribly. Right now. My (ex)friend is not mocking a dead person's death (past tense); my (ex)friend is mocking the current suffering and dying (present tense) of a person.


Laughing at the dead is crass but essentially harmless. Laughing at the suffering and dying is ghoulish.