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Path: utzoo!utcsri!utai!gkloker
From: gkloker@utai.UUCP (Geoff Loker)
Newsgroups: net.jokes.d
Subject: Re: "tasteless" jokes
Message-ID: <1282@utai.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 11-Feb-86 12:55:06 EST
Article-I.D.: utai.1282
Posted: Tue Feb 11 12:55:06 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 11-Feb-86 13:33:14 EST
References: <119@nbs-amrf.UUCP> <225@imagen.UUCP> <237@pilchuckDataio.UUCP> <179@riacs.ARPA>
Reply-To: gkloker@utai.UUCP (Geoff Loker)
Distribution: net
Organization: CSRI, University of Toronto
Lines: 42
Summary: 

In article <179@riacs.ARPA> julian@riacs.ARPA (Julian E. Gomez) writes:
>> > > The following jokes are SO tasteless, that I have rotated them TWICE!
>> >   . . .
>> > 
>> > Slightly clever maybe, but sorry, Jeff -- these jokes didn't make me
>> > smile this time.  Bad time for shuttle jokes.
>> 	. . .
>> 
>> Yes, I agree...massive bad timing. There's a hell of a lot more things in
>> the world we can mock, besides a tragedy like the Challenger's. C'mon and
>> be civil...only so much sicko is allowed on this group...there's just
>> no need to make fun of a group of people getting killed.
>
>So where were all you nay-sayers when the Ethiopians were dropping
>like flies and the jokes about it were all over the net?

Unfortunately, it seems that we can only grasp tragedy when it happens
in small numbers.  When we hear that seven people die in an accident,
it is more personal a tragedy than when we hear of 7 million dying
of hunger.  It wasn't until pictures of individual people dying of
starvation came onto our TV screens that we started to take the Ethiopian
crisis seriously.

net.jokes shows how little we understand things involving big numbers:
when Baby Faye died, there were almost no jokes about it;  when the
space shuttle blew up, there were a few jokes, but the flood of responses
against the jokes were overwhelming.  As for Ethiopian jokes, there
was a veritable flood of jokes with very little argument against it.

Maybe we should all work at understanding tragedy no matter what size
a scale it happens on.

-- 
Geoff Loker
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto
Toronto, ON
M5S 1A4

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