I dunno. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes right? Don’t get me wrong, it’s still tragic what happened to those people, but I don’t have much sympathy.

It’s dark comedy for a tragically comic situation.

By definition, I’d say all of the jokes are in very poor taste, which is what makes them so funny. The specifics of this particular tragedy practically call out for grim comedy: Safety shmafety, Logitech, Blink 182 getting sucked into the spotlight, etc.

I do think that all the chatter about the disaster has underscored some critically important points:

Billionaires are just as stupid as everyone else. They are not exceptional people in any way.

If you’re not a deep sea oceanography expert of any sort, you should keep your undersea adventures to much shallower waters.

“Hey Personal Assistant, can you give me the dirt sheet on this submarine company? I’m thinking of visiting the Titanic.” Would have saved lives. Those tickets to an undersea adventure were a quarter of a million dollars per seat. I’ve done better due diligence buying a ukulele online than these halfwits.

Personally, I think it’s all about the balance.

There are a handful of affected families and millions cracking their own jokes. No one (hopefully!) is harassing the victims’ families.

Admittedly, my moral perspective is, apparently, a little skewed. I find it mind boggling that we as a culture have normalized sweatshops to make almost everything and children mining and dying to make our phones but draw the line at jokes. Just seems weird, like a plantation slave owner chiding me for saying “damn.”

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“Tragedy will be exclusively joked about because my empathy is bumming me out”

-Bo Burnham

Also the only person I feel bad for was the guy’s 19 year old son.

I think it’s hard to just handwave and say “meme bad”. These are some of the people I’ve come across with it:

First the easy one, edgelords online want to rile people up. I personally don’t care, engaging them at all is just encouraging them. There are worse things to make memes about IMO, this is not one of them to get riled up over.

Second, people who genuinely don’t care about this and think it’s ridiculous the media covered it so much. I’m half in this boat, there are way more newsworthy things to cover than 5 people drowning in a custom made sub on a mission that they literally signed away their life to do. However,

Third, people who see this as a tragedy. The other half of me is here, at least one of the people genuinely wanted to see the Titanic. Which, maybe it’s hard for us to understand the price tag, but if you had a dream of seeing it since you were a child, wanted nothing more than to see it, and were offered it, would you? And if not, if someone offered you a trip to see what you wanted to more than anything else in the world, would you want to? Go step on the moon? It’s like if someone offered you the ability to literally go to a fictional place, then that 250k doesn’t seem so much, if that was your once in a lifetime must do once and exactly once, if you saved up for 20 years. Those are the people I mourn.

Fourth, and I think this is a small group, people who are legit sad but treat humor as a coping mechanism. I think a lot of people forget about them, they aren’t trying to make situations like this into something controversial, they just cope differently, and that’s okay.