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Liara Kaylee Tsai, a Trans Woman With “Incredibly Powerful Energy,” Found Dead in Minnesota.
First things first: this is an unspeakable tragedy, I feel terrible for this person's friends and family, and anyone cracking jokes about "their pronouns were was/were" is disgusting and should be ashamed of themselves.
This article is remarkably forthright, refusing even to lie by omission:
I predict that this will go one of two ways:
No, it's not an unspeakable tragedy. It's a murder. Gruesome surely, tragic for those close to her. But people have been making light of murder for, well, probably forever. Do kids still sing about Lizzie Borden giving her father 40 whacks? We did. If stabbings are unspeakable tragedies what do we make of Louis Armstrong doing Mack the Knife? Because that's an American songbook classic.
Making light of the macabre is a normal human response. It's not disgusting or evil. R/HermanCainAward? Good content. Was/were? That joke would honestly kill if it were told at a drag show. The gulag and the purges were unspeakable tragedies, yet the scene in Death of Stalin where periodic gunshots are heard in the NKVD hallway was hilarious.
A holocaust survivor dies of old age and goes to heaven. When he gets there he meets God and tells him a holocaust joke.
God says, “That’s not funny.”
And the man says, “I guess you had to be there. “
As for the PR possibilities of the murder, it'll probably just be sorted into a pile of "trans murders" and used in statistics. The reality based community will continue to note that trans women have a murder rate higher than natal women but well below that of the general male population; they will not succeed in persuading anyone.
Ouch, what a burn.
I think that a lot hinges on the intended audience. Mailing jokes about murder victims to their relatives would be terrible poor taste. On the other hand, one man's tragedy is another man's statistic, and if you are in mourning you should know better than to check what wisecracks on twitter say.
By revealed preference, most societies do not treat the lives of all human persons as sacred. Apart from being about a dead person, the was/were joke seems pretty mild and does not assign a lower value to trans persons, and such jokes can be a reasonable way to deal with far-removed tragedy.
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Revolting.
A testament to how remedial drag humour is.
This is actually funny.
Agreed, but if a comparable subreddit was started for trans suicides or other left-orientated 'natural consequences of indulging the initial reflex to do something dumb' it would be nuked from orbit.
I wonder what that would be?
Like, there’s liberals who do dumb things. But there doesn’t seem to be a massive pattern in which dumb things. Obesity is in practice not a liberal thing. R/shouldn’thavefoughtthecops gets nuked for racial insensitivity, not ideology. R/detrans maybe?
Obesity is arguably a dumb thing, but it's generally more seen as a lazy or weak thing. Glamorizing obesity - followed by the health consequences that follow - is the dumb thing that people could point to. I recall people actually have done this, with a viral clip recently of some transgender YouTuber listing examples of fat activists and/or others who tended to glamorize the lifestyle that would lead to obesity who died at comically young ages. Don't know that there'd be enough content to support a full subreddit, though.
I'm not sure how this works. Assuming this subreddit would be to showcase people getting beaten or killed for fighting the cops, and the racial insensitivity being alluded to hear has to do with the likely disproportionate number (relative to the general population, though perhaps not relative to actual police interactions) of people of certain races who would show up in such videos, that just seems like a case of ideology. The belief that showcasing a disproportionate number of people of certain races being harmed by police is racially insensitive is, in itself, ideological.
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Trans stuff. Fatpersonacceptance movements tend to be more left-coded even if obesity itself isn't
I think the sub for making fun of fat acceptance advocates getting their faces eaten by leopards is, in practice, /r/fatpeoplehate, which got nuked for being horrible and insensitive and not directly for political reasons.
I agree that trans stuff, to a lesser extent other LGBT, and maybe progressive attitudes towards sex more broadly is the main liberal coded way to hurt yourself through stupidity(you might could add in certain categories of drug use but definitely not all of them). I agree that subs making fun of them for facing the consequences would probably be short lived, although I imagine the reasoning is more along the lines of ‘vulnerable people’ and less along the lines of progressive ideology. Offline conservatives don’t talk so callously about trans suicide either.
It astounds me that some people actually still buy this logic. You actually think Reddit of all places just takes some bold universal stance in the name of all that is wholesome and pure against the "horrible and insensitive"? The place where "horrible and insensitive" content directed at the right targets (that is, right-wingers, if the italics didn't strike you) is nearly universal and openly celebrated?
Incidentally, the public record will show that /r/fatpeoplehate was taken out by being accused of "doxxing" by the Reddit admins for highlighting publicly available images (that is, pictures on public "About Us" and other staff pages until they were taken down (I believe, been a long time, could be wrong) after being discovered) of overweight Imgur employees (who had started removing content from the sub uploaded there)... including the company's designated mascot/office dog (leading to probably the most notable aspect of the affair, the persistent slogan of "Even their dog is fat." (and yes the dog was indeed visibly and objectively afflicted by canine obesity)).
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That's kind of the point, though. Obesity is a considerable bigger deal than COVID in terms of health impacts and yet making fun of fat acceptance is outside of the Overton Window
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Well, /r/fatlogic is still alive and kicking, though it's mods tend to be cautious lest the admins nuke the place. About the spiciest type of comment you can get away with is remarking on the irony of various super-morbidly obese persons who advocated for fat rights and then died in their 40's.
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Jared Taylor had an episode of his show dedicated to white missionaries who go to Haiti to run orphanages and get robbed and murdered. It was done in his usual respectful and restrained way but the subtext was 'these people are very naive and very very stupid': https://www.amren.com/videos/2024/05/haiti-devours-white-missionaries/
Similar things probably happen to aid workers too, from a certain point of view the religious and secular organizations are one and the same.
‘Missionary in a shithole’ says ‘conservative Christian’ to me, not liberal or progressive. I mean, I wouldn’t allow my kid to go on mission to Haiti, but that’s exactly the kind of person who does go on mission to Haiti- not a liberal. I think everyone knows the risks awaiting peace corps workers too and they don’t get made fun of because of the perception that they chose to take that risk perfectly cognizant of how big a risk it is.
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Really? For me this is indistinguishable from
The punch line here would be if Alice personally crashed her plane a few months after arguing with people about air safety on Twitter. Regardless of the statistical safety of air travel, that would be funny. I believe the term is ironic humor.
Not really relevant to the broader topic, but there's an incredibly on-point example of this: a reddit account (https://old.reddit.com/user/UR_WRONG_ABOUT_V22) whose sole purpose was correcting people who thought the V-22 Osprey was unsafe.
About 7 months ago, he died in a V-22 crash off the coast of Japan.
Wait, are you telling me he died and his account was taken over by his wife who is equally abrasive and obsessed with the honor of the V22?
My suspicions are aroused.
But what's the alternative? The guy whose entire thing is talking about how safe the V22 is faked his own death in a v22 crash to... undermine his own points?
I guess he could be trying to blunt the effect of the v22 crash by making it personal to the point that people can't bring it up, but... a single crash was going to destroy his argument so fully that he's committing to forever pretending to be his own wife (and having to repeatedly bring up the crash again and again in context) as a result of this? He can't just point out that "safe" is not "infinitely safe"?
The Internet's just weird.
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I dunno, it's just not clicking for me. If Herman Cain had said the virus was a psyop or fake or made up and literally no one had ever died from it (or would ever die from it), then fair enough, that would've been legitimately ironic. But all he said was that it wasn't as dangerous as it was made out to be (and bear in mind, at the time of writing it was totally normal to see normie liberals referring to Covid as the end of the world, or projecting death tolls orders of magnitude higher than the true figures even with the implementation of punitive restrictions), which doesn't mean no one will ever die from it.
It's the classic John Sedgwick joke.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sedgwick?wprov=sfti1
His command to his soldiers to stand up may have been perfectly reasonable, it nonetheless is remembered as a very funny joke.
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On one hand, yeah, that's ironic. On the other hand, there isn't a culture war issue around air travel where the people who think air travel is dangerous really do think that the crash proves them right.
I'm not so sure about that. I've been flying around the country recently, and on my last flight, I caught Covid. /s (I actually did catch covid though.)
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Look, I'm on the Herman Cain side of Covid seriousness, but I can't deny a good joke, and "Sir, the virus killed you. You died from it." is just a good line.
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Wally, did we eat the onion here?
Kinda seems the other way around, doesn't it? Maybe I missed something!
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