Jun
13th
2016
You know what? Screw it. · 2:12am Jun 13th, 2016
I've decided to do a Letter on Orlando.
And don't any of you fucking dare say "too soon."
When I somehow start predicting tragedies by parodying them before they occur, then you can tell me too soon.
Making parody and satire out of tragedies removes the power from those that caused them.
So if this upcoming chapter makes you cackle, chuckle, or even giggle, congratulations.
You will have taken power away from Omar and whatever god he killed in the name of.
Go you! Never be afraid to address events as they happen.
Go ahead and write that chapter, the world needs more people who aren't afraid to say what needs to be said or do what needs to be done.
Parodic spin is key. Just doing something like "50 gay ponies were killed at Horse Club in Horse Orlando Horse Florida" is the kind of think you get flack for.
4018765 I get it. Hopefully this one will be better than the last one.
Thank you
and we knew it was coming sooner or later (tomorrow night at the latest)
4018784 I thought the Brock Turner one was funny, I was more talking generally.
Either everything is okay or nothing is. There is no time limit or minimum. Sometimes the best thing is the "comedy" kings kept jesters for a reason after all.
Good. That is very very good. ISIS is doing this shit because they want to scare people. If they can't scare us they won't do it.
This should be interesting
4018873
Dude, they do it because they like to kill people. They sincerely think it is their religious duty to do so. Trying to scare people is just an added bonus to them.
To my knowledge, Robin Williams was possibly the first more visible comedian to begin cracking jokes about the events of 9/11. It is a very real fact that coping requires a great many things. Finding ways to have humor even regarding tragic events helps us all process what is so impactful and difficult to face.
Tears and laughter both are sometimes underappreciated tools of healing.
You know, my Dad always sees this and says shit like "just kill off the Muslims" and I find myself constantly telling him that that's exactly the reaction they want out of us. They want us to sink down to their level and throw away our humanity.
Misfortune without humor is just misery
Called it.
4018905 I'll agree with that. Now I am 100% behind killing off the bad ones in hopefully painful or explosive ways.
4018888 No they don't. ISIS (or whatever you feel like calling them) don't have a real religious agenda. They make basic lip service to Islam, but that's not even remotely related to why they do what they do. What they actually are is a large nihilistic death cult born out of decades of anger at repeated oppression by a mess of different groups and destructive outside interference which was primarily focused on using the regional factions as pawns in their own power games, particularly during the Cold War. ISIS's only real platform is anger, and that is why they have been able to gather so much support. There are tons of angry poor people who are perfectly happy to throw their screwed up lives away to get some measure of revenge at a collection of systems that all want to screw them over to prop up some asshole or another, so when they see an organization that is having success at that they naturally flock to it. The really pitiful thing is that while this has been building for decades, the spark that lit it off was actually cast by Obama when he refused to give weapons to the moderate pro-democracy rebels in Syria which caused them to collapse and their people to join more extreme groups because it was clear to them that all the US talk about promoting freedom and democracy was meaningless propaganda, especially given the low cost of the guns and ammunition they needed.
4018972 On one hand I semi agree. I kinda just spitballed an answer out there since most folks don't really know enough to care. That said, per the dozens of friends that have 'been there, done that' you do have that smattering of zealots and people that just want to lash out.
I will wholeheartedly agree with O fucking them over. He's been horrible for international relations and the view of America as a whole. Let alone the stuff on the homefront.
Then again, I'm half in the mindset that the US should go semi isolationist. Semi closed borders, only help our allies, and spend all that money fixing our internal issues before going back out into the world. It'll never happen, but it's a nice thought.
Hear, hear!
*raises glass*
I'll look forward to it. You should add in a joke about the mods on /r/news from reddit censoring the topic and removing everything once the shooter was announced as Muslim.
4018888 True. But the bonus is a very important part of the image they like to project to both themselves and others.
Wait, what're we talking about?
4018988 Honestly, I feel like that ignorance makes it even more important to be accurate. Many people wind up forming their opinions based on little more than hearsay, so it is critical to make sure that what we say provides a meaningful picture of reality for them.
As for zealots, while there are undoubtedly some, I would expect them to gravitate towards the true extremist Islamic organizations like Al-Qaeda which are still very active throughout the region to be with, although I obviously don't have any direct experience to call on here.
As for isolationism, that's honestly a big part of why Obama has been such a failure on the international scene. For better or worse, the current international order was built around the assumption that the US was providing the heavy lifting enforcing global norms, and Obama's shift towards isolationism is what has allowed significantly increased Russian and Chinese aggression. We'll have to see how things shake out, but the fact of the matter is that US supremacy has made large-scale wars impossible since the end of the Cold War, something that could change with an isolationist policy in the US.
Hmm... Well, South Park waited 2 months after 9/11, so 1 day shouldn't be that crazy. It's time to parody stuff!
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4019109 all valid points
4018888 Apart that is very likely ISIS didn't know anything about the Oralndo guy until the news informed them, to think of them (not the occasional guy that decide to embark in a suicide action, but the vast majority of the IS militants) as a religious extremists tend to miss the point, and made the intelligence fail about them for years.
They are more like common criminals (not by chance the main recruitment centers of IS's "foreign fighters" in the west are the prisons) that use the religion as an excuse to take the power, and do what a common criminal usually wants to do. Their version of Islam is tailored to let them do whatever they want (rapes, murders, taking drugs, slave trading, like every kind of elsewere-illegal trading..., even homosexuality, as long as the militant is the active part) almost everything they do has an hidden economic goal (IE the destruction of antiquities. They couldn't be sold as they were, but, once destroyed, the pieces are immediatly sold in the international market).
Not by chance, the IS begun to massively lose militants when the anti-IS alliance begun to target their funding sources. A religious extremist doesn't care about the money, but a criminal wants to be paid.
4019221 oddly enough, ISIS said there would be an attack in Florida this weekend 4 days ago. Plus the shooter praised ISIS during the shooting, and they claimed it after the fact. Considering the shooters job prior to this was to ferry stuff across the border in a van that was rarely inspected (worked a .gov contract for G4S) and ISIS stating they are going to give us a bloody Ramadan, I don't like the potential implications.
Let alone the fact the guy was investigated by the FBI several times, the child of taliban supporters that attempted to get in leadership positionS in AFG, and hilariously enough a registered democrat. Like most of the mass shooters lately. Weird but true
And yes, all of those statements are independently verifiable via trusted mainstream sources.
As for the rest, some are criminals, sons believers, some desperate people. My points remain though.
4019224 I know, thanks, but the shooter phraising ISIS, only accounts of him admiring them (many mad murderers phraised God, that doesen't mean they were acting on his behalf), and the FBI investigations only accounts of him having vague extremist tendencies when he was investigated (infact they didn't even decided to try an entrapment). It's evident that this particular mass shooter was moved by religious motivations, like others had racial, political or social ones. There has to be one, but what's in particular is not so important. For the rest, IS announces attacks to my city every second days since at least three years so far. Sooner or lather they are right.
I may be wrong of course, but to me there is nothing in the Orlando Guy that makes him any different to the Aurora guy, the Virginia Tech guy, and so on.
Humor has no limits, so it's whatever.