From: mathew@mantis.co.uk
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: Re: Ken vs Gypsy, CJ and others
Date: 9 Apr 92 18:27:22 GMT
Organization: Mantis Consultants, Cambridge. UK.

In <1992Apr5.044434.13363@alembic.acs.com> gypsy@alembic.acs.com (cupid's
six-guns) writes:
> In article <FVuNiB17w164w@mantis.co.uk> mathew@mantis.co.uk (From A to B) writes:
> >Goodbye disaster jokes.  Goodbye morbid humour.  Goodbye war jokes.  I
> >suppose we can all sit around talking about bunny rabbits and being nice to
> >people.
>
> i am talking about making fun of one individual's personal
> anguish, regardless of its connection to reality.
> 
> i'm not talking about disaster jokes, i'm not talking about
> rape jokes, i'm not talking about any other kind of joke.  i
> am talking about singling out INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE and publicly 
> abusing them because you think there's a chance they might 
> not be telling the exact truth.

I see.  So it's alright to humiliate and abuse people as a group, it's just
not alright to do it to individual people?

> the pain caused by jokes that cover a group of people is
> lessened by the fact that the hearer knows the joke is not
> aimed specifically at himself.

Oh, yeah.  Suuuure it is.  "OK, so I was telling nigger jokes, but they
weren't aimed at any *specific* nigger..."

> (i would be glad to mail you copies of all the posts of this
> kind i have copies of, if you haven't seen them.)

If you have full posts, rather than just Ken's replies, then that would
perhaps be enlightening.  It's rather hard to judge whether Ken is being
reasonable in doubting someone's alleged experiences unless you quote what
those alleged experiences are, something which I note you were careful to
avoid doing.

> >> and people who wilfully upset other people must learn to cope with
> >> the anger and pain of the people they have upset.
> >
> >Indeed.  They apparently must learn to cope with 'upset' people threatening
> >their job and threatening to harass them, all because of words on a computer
> >screen.
> 
> yes, absolutely.  if ken is so moronic that he doesn't know 
> better than to post potentially inflammatory material from his
> school (?) account, then yes, he certainly does have to cope 
> with that.

I see.  So it's open season on you, is it?  Or have you forgotten your
charming and amusing article about Nazi death camps?

<1991Aug12.033033.1937@alembic.acs.com>
| okay, so i was just talking to prs about how bored i was
| when suddenly i had this great idea for a trivia game.
| it would be called "Trivial Atrocity."  the board would
| have a big circle with a swastika in it, sort of like the
| trivial pursuit board only the arms would be the arms of
| the swastika.  you'd have this little game piece and you
| would have to fill it with little triangles like the ones
| on the sleeves of the concentration camp uniforms, one in
| each color that was used (pink for homosexuals, black for
| vagrants, green for jews, etc) and when you got it all 
| filled up you would go up one of the arms of the swastika
| and take them all to the gas chamber in the middle.

Sorry, I forgot -- *that* article was OK because you weren't trivializing the
suffering of *individual* Jews.  Not in *person*.  And because you put a big
"actually, I don't think this is funny at all" disclaimer on the front.  Yeah,
sure, I believe that.

Frankly, I think your condemnation of Ken stinks of hypocrisy.  I don't buy
your argument that there's some magical difference between 'humiliating and
offending a group' and 'humiliating and offending individuals' which makes
the former acceptable and the latter not.

Be honest:  The real reason you get so bent out of shape by Ken's jokes about
reports of sexual abuse is that it happened to you, and you're still not over
it.  Whereas you're quite prepared to joke about reports of conditions in the
Nazi death camps, because you didn't experience that.  All this rubbish about
individuals vs. groups is just rationalization, isn't it?

I don't see how you think you can get away with condemning Ken for joking 
about sexual abuse to an audience which includes victims of sexual abuse; not
when you're happy to make jokes about gas chambers to an audience which 
doubtless includes Jews whose relatives were killed by the Nazis, if not
actual victims of Nazi butchery.

As I recall, you claim to be a Christian.  Let she who is without sin cast
the first stone.

Sorry to turn up the heat on you, but I've really had enough of this.  If
you're wondering why I kept your little article, I filed it away because I
found it funny.  Yeah, "ha ha ha", funny.  I didn't expect I'd ever want to
quote it on the net.  And when I commented that people were being too quick
to condemn Ken, I didn't think you'd start a prolonged flame war, perhaps
because I didn't know you'd been a victim of sexual abuse.

I have a sick sense of humour. But unlike you, I'm willing to admit it.  And
I don't condemn others when their idea of a sick joke doesn't make me laugh,
or when they touch on painful experiences I've suffered.  And as I have said
before, when I'm faced with someone who's genuinely suffering, I am perfectly
capable of showing sympathy and compassion.  I'm not an inhuman monster any
more than you are.  So I'm not going to sit back and be portrayed as one, nor
am I going to let you pull the same stunt against Ken Johnson.

Maybe I shouldn't have tried to defend him in the first place.  I've probably
made more enemies than I've made friends.  But sometimes it's better to be
right than to be popular, and I think I'm right when I say that Ken should be
given the benefit of the doubt, and that we shouldn't assume he was being
purely malicious.


mathew
-- 
Civilization is just a temporary failure of entropy.