Diabetes vs. Dead Babies - Neither Is Really All That Funny

So, for the past several days something has been bugging me, and I think I finally figured out the reasons why. Last weekend, one of my friends posted a meme about Krispy Kremes donuts being 'diabetes in a box'.

Not the actual image, but close enough.

I didn't think the joke was funny, because I thought it was played out, over done, lacking any sort of creativity or novelty (though it did make me want a donut). However, one of his friends objected, because they felt it was insensitive to her diabetic son. Part of her argument, of course, was that Type 1 diabetes is in no way the result of diet. Others have argued that type 2 diabetes may also have no association at all with diet, as this blog post with absolutely no citations will tell you (if it weren't nearing 7am, I'd look for a more credible source like the one my friend posted with his apology). In that case, the meme was not medically accurate, so a retraction would certainly be warranted, as well as an apology to Krispy Kreme.

But she was offended on behalf of her son, not on behalf of the maligned corporation. She claimed that diabetic individuals are a marginalized population, and that the post was insensitive towards them because it contributed to their stigmatization. That seemed like a stretch. I come from a family where diabetes is very common and treated as a near-inevitability with age that's simply staved off with good diet and exercise (I will likely be diagnosed with it younger than most of my family members). The claim that diabetics are stigmatized seems like a stretch, since I have never - not once - heard any of my family members complain about being marginalized. I talked to my mother on the phone about it that night and she laughed at the notion and expressed incredulity.

One could argue that my family suffers from internalized stigma because they've bought into the misinformation, but the understanding is pretty clear in my family that one box of donuts will not cause diabetes, and no one has been especially self-deprecatory about their diabetic status or closeted about it. It is what it is and it's extremely common - something has to kill us eventually, and until then it's just a matter of doing what we can to keep our extremities attached. One could argue that my family (mom included) just happens to be oblivious to the stigma they face, but in the context of any other marginalized group that suggestion would be a joke - if you can somehow 'miss' that you're stigmatized in society, it's difficult to believe that your group is all that stigmatized.

[Though, I will admit that the way the woman who complained to my friend talked about diabetics made me feel that type-2 diabetics - like those in my family - may be stigmatized within the diabetic community, since her complaint pointedly emphasized respect for the distinction between the two types.]

Offensive Is As Offenders Do?

Maybe it was offensive to diabetics, maybe it wasn't. As a pre-diabetic I wasn't offended, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. At the time I primarily voiced skepticism that an apology for the Krispy Kreme meme was necessary, because I felt that the burden of responsibility placed on the person apologizing was unreasonable - we can't be responsible for offending people when our offenses require unreasonable associative leaps to be seen as offensive. I suggested numerous examples of places where that's problematic (e.g., men's right activists being offended anytime feminists talk about anything that's not men's rights, and vice versa).

I specifically recalled an incident in which my wife (apparently) upset an elderly widow at a nearby table by using her phone during a quick brunch. The woman had interrupted our meal and publicly shamed my wife in front of the rest of the people in the restaurant for not paying enough attention to me. I said that while the woman may have been genuinely offended, the fact was that my wife was sitting quietly minding her own business, and shouldn't be expected to apologize for that (which, actually, she did), because the leap the woman had taken to be offended was unreasonable. That example then led to me being told that we should have expressed our condolences to the widow (which, actually, we did), that we shouldn't have been offended because the woman meant well (double standard, much?), and that I clearly lacked empathy for being offended that a stranger had felt entitled to insert herself into our lives that way.

Dead Babies Are Funny?

After my friend made a public apology for the donut joke, the next thing he (the one who said I lacked empathy) posted on Facebook was a link to a news article publishing a long list of tweets cyberbullying the mother of an unvaccinated child who'd gone to Twitter seeking help in the face of a measles outbreak. Most of the tweets published in the article consisted of comments like, "I hope you didn't get attached" or "I hope you didn't name it yet."

I (the one without empathy) raised disbelief that this sort of thing was somehow praiseworthy to my friend, who'd just the day before apologized for the Diabetes Donut Debacle and asserted that he liked to think of himself as "a fairly sensitive guy." My friend was very annoyed at the "minor discrepancies" I had pointed out in his choices, and defended his choice to post the article. Apparently, the Twitter cyberbullying and public shaming were not insensitive because:

1. The jokes were made at the mother's expense rather than the child's (kind of like making jokes about Krispy Kreme isn't the same as making jokes about diabetics?). 
2. The mother - statistically - was *probably* an antivaxxer rather than the mother of a child who couldn't be vaccinated for medical reasons (about 1 in 18 unvaccinated children are unvaccinated due to medical exemptions rather than philosophical objections, which doesn't seem like a "slim, slim chance" or a "very, very small percentage" to me).
3. Parents "are given free access to all the information they need, in fact it's often shoved at them, about the importance of vaccination" so there is no excuse for someone falling for the antivaxxer fear mongering (despite the fact that parents have also had free information shoved at them by that fear-mongering campaign, and by the loudest, most influential voice in our country and the media chorus that's helped politicize it).
4. Unvaccinated kids are a huge health problem and we need to do everything we can to persuade antivaxxers they're wrong (I'm sure sharing dead baby jokes with provaccine friends is really effective in that regard).

No one responded to his thread with suggestions that the Twitter cyberbullies could have asked why the woman's child was unvaccinated before attacking her. None of them asked why the people responding to the woman didn't just say 'Vaccinate your child' and move on. And no one pointed out that vaccinations take weeks to kick in, so even if the woman did go out and vaccinate her child immediately, it would be too late to help in her present circumstances - effectively, her three year old was now on death-row, with only the die roll of fate to save her.

Instead his other friends just laughed at the woman's public humiliation and jokes about the deaths of unvaccinated children, and defended his choice to promote it. Somehow, for objecting to their merriment, I was again the unempathetic one - I guess I wasn't empathizing with the bullies...? (Though to be fair, the last comment to that effect was removed about an hour later.)

But here's the reason this has stuck in my throat for days - despite the fact that I (supposedly) am insensitive and lack empathy, compassion, respect for my fellow human being, or the ability to 'take and understand other people's perspectives', generally speaking, I DON'T POST SHIT LIKE THAT.

I went back through all of my 2019 Facebook posts, and while a lot of them are commenting on political or ideological issues, the closest any of them really come to mockery were some comments about our 45th president (e.g., questioning his parentage and needing to see his birth certificate) and this image that I shared:

I apologize to any pugs this image may have distressed by my post.

Why? For some reason I just don't find humor in the suffering or humiliation of real people. Sometimes I laugh at the misfortune of fictional characters (though often I do not - it's why I leave horror movies depressed) and I have only occasional discomfort gunning down NPCs in a FPS or stabbing them in Assassin's Creed, but when it comes to real people, human suffering - realized or imminent - doesn't seem funny. I still feel frustrated when people do things that are foolish, and I feel vindicated when they pay the consequences, but I guess I just don't usually find it *funny* - even less so when it's someone else (like an unvaccinated child) who will pay the cost.

Maybe I'm just not a funny person.

Compassion When It's Convenient

One thing that struck me out of all of the arguments the past few days is at some point my friend said something like 'we should have respect and compassion for those who deserve it' (I'd provide the exact quote, but the thread that it was in has been removed from Facebook).

So, basically, his attitude in that conversation was that we should respect the people that... we respect? That's more tautology than morality - you could just as easily boil it down to, "It's okay for me to bully this person because I want to bully this person." It has the window dressing of progressive thought, but at the end of the day it's just a thin veneer of social justice applied to the decision each of us makes about whose feelings we care about and how much we care about them.

Don't get me wrong, that decision is a necessary one, but most of the people who are keen to tell you 'we should respect and care about every human being' will immediately turn around and start applying qualifiers for who gets included in that protected category. I can accept that this sort of social triage is an ugly and biased process, but I rankle at the hypocrisy common in its implementation.

Stupid Shaming

Within my social circles, the criteria for exclusion is essentially one of intellect. If a person's ailments, failures, under-achievements, or mistakes can be (even partly) attributed to societal oppression, disability, or genetic predisposition, then they are clearly victims of circumstance, not accountable for their situation, and should not be mocked (which is perfectly reasonable). However, if their failures are perceived to be due to intellectual disadvantages or ignorance then their mistakes make them fair game for any harassment up to and (for some people) including death threats (levied against high school students), and a storm of comments to the effect of 'I don't condone death threats, but I totally condone these death threats'.

This was in response to an article about a Catholic boys school receiving threats.

People often make overly confident assumptions about the person they're mocking, assuming stupidity before circumstantial limitations (e.g., assuming the woman with the unvaccinated child is an antivaxxer, despite there being a better than 5% chance she wasn't), but even if that weren't the case, would it be okay to do so? Intellect and competence are very much a product of factors like upbringing and mental functioning, neither of which are wholly under a person's control. If it's okay to expect that everyone should just choose to be smarter, then it seems strange to get upset when someone says that a person should choose to be more thick-skinned. If it's not okay to disrespect 'touchy' people for their emotional vulnerability, why is it okay to disrespect stupid people for their intellectual vulnerability?

I don't deny that some people are idiots, but I tend to either pity them or to be frustrated by them, rather than thinking they're funny. I'm sure that (somehow) means something terrible about me.

Maybe I'm just too sensitive.