PSA: Reject demoralization porn!
I will laugh at the virus, even if it kills me—
no, especially if it kills me.

Quote from: Hueristic on Today at 02:29:39 PM

As I was bleeding to death I looked up at the paramedic and said "Oh god don't let your ugly ass face be the last thing I see", he had a good laugh and that is how I face adversity. If you can't look death in the eye and laugh thats your own weakness.

Don't let fear rule your life, if you do then your not living, your just existing.

Quote from: Hueristic on Today at 04:12:55 PM

No-one gets out of life alive.

RESPECT.

Quote from: nullius on March 15, 2020, 05:53:59 PM

Life is risk, and death is a part of life.

Quote from: Lauda on Today at 04:34:17 PM

Quote from: Hueristic on Today at 04:12:55 PM

No-one gets out of life alive.

I have 9 lives, and even I do not get out alive - you win this argument.

LOL.

Quote from: Nietzsche (Also sprach Zarathustra)

I should only believe in a god that would know how to dance.

And when I saw my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn: he was the spirit of gravity—through him all things fall.

Not by wrath, but by laughter, do we slay. Come, let us slay the spirit of gravity!

Quote from: ibminer on Today at 12:39:04 PM

Quote from: OgNasty on Today at 01:58:06 AM

Quote from: ibminer on Today at 12:26:37 AM

Please refrain on using me in your weak attempts to garner narcissistic supply.
My advice to you is: seek psychotherapy.

My advice to you is: quit acting like a bitch.

I fully realize narcissistic bullies, such as yourself, see compassion and empathy as being a "bitch" behavior... but hopefully one day you will be able to grow up... although, I also realize it's part of your mental disorder, so I'll try to be sympathetic to your condition.

I have no truck with Mr Nasty. Whereas you are yapping up the wrong tree with this insufferable preaching: Your lecture on “compassion and empathy” is basically just a Jesus sermon, regardless of its being dressed up in modern liberal terminology.

As is well-known to the very few people who have taken the trouble to educate themselves in such matters, liberals are essentially second-century Christians in disguise. Case in point: Your determination to save his soul (L. psyche < Gk. ψυχή), and your simpering faux-sympathetic moralizing about the devil in him. The Christian version of that lecture is that you will pray for him and his condition. Surely, this will ~~impress him with your virtue~~ make him laugh and blow you off with another crude comment—but at least it makes you feel good, which is the important part.

For my part:

I have a profound admiration for the courage and stamina of people I know who actually contracted COVID-19, and have struggled to shrug it off with a smile despite feeling horribly sick, with immediate rational concerns about worse. I am determined that if, despite my severe individual precautions, I myself were to contract COVID-19, I must follow their heroic example despite my pre-existing health condition, which makes the virus almost tantamount to a death sentence for me. If I were to die of it, I would want for people to remember me not for the disease that killed me, but for whatever I may have achieved within the necessarily short span of my human lifetime.

I salute the front-line medical professionals who are calmly bathing themselves in a sea of the virus—without flinching, without complaint—with the calm, cold, rational scientific knowledge that due to the disease course often caused by high viral load, they may be tomorrow hooked up to the ventilators that they are hooking other people up to today. I do hope that they have first dibs on those precious ventilators, for they are deliberately inflicting the virus on themselves to save the lives of total strangers who probably do not properly appreciate what they are doing. Danger is their calling.

Whereas I have no patience for cowardice, a quality which by its nature is revealed by adversity, risk, and death. Safety and prosperity do not reveal character. This does. Character is also not revealed by idle big talk from a position of comfortable theories. Cold reality now says: “Put up or shut up.”

The extreme negative reactions to theymos’ joke are symptomatic of a disease worse than the virus: The moral weakness of modern society, and of people who never would have survived the untold aeons of plagues, famines, wars, and other perpetual adversity that preceded the soft comfort and illusory safety of technocratic modern times. You only exist because your ancestors long ago struggled for survival against risks and crises that really make COVID-19 look like a joke.

The Black Death is only one example: A disease with high infectiousness like coronavirus, but which really did cut down even young, healthy people as a scythe fells stalks of wheat. If the Black Death were to hit today, I think that modern moral weaklings would commit mass-suicide to try to avoid being killed by disease. They are anyway doing something almost tantamount to that, over COVID-19.

Quote from: ibminer on Today at 12:39:04 PM

There are real people with real suffering happening,

Yes, and this is reality: Life is risk. People die.

It is very sad. But if you cannot cope with reality, then you are probably not a person who should be making Internet armchair diagnoses of the psychological condition of others. You are lecturing others about “real people” from a world of fantasy.

And you are sitting on an Internet forum and making unwarranted assumptions about the need for moralistic lectures by the real people behind the screen names who are joking about the virus. Do NOT make such assumptions. You have no idea what real people are behind the screen names, and what real suffering may be kept private.

Boldface on the key phrases where the virtue-signalling metre pegged:

Quote from: ibminer on Today at 12:39:04 PM

and I don't think there was much educational value or humor involved here. The less serious it is made out to be.. by making a game or a joke out of it after recently posting people were overreacting, and downplaying it.. sends a bad message IMO. The more people that don't take it seriously, the more it will spread and increase the death rate and suffering of all those involved.

Pure moralistic acid—virtue-signalling, in modern parlance.

You are deliberately trying to demoralize anybody who is not sufficiently panicked for your tastes. It is you who are sending “a bad message”.

Whereas morale is critical to long-term survival, and also to having a world that is actually worth living in.

Quote from: ibminer on Today at 12:39:04 PM

Don't get me wrong, I have a sense of humor, I've listened to several songs & parodies about the virus, and had a good laugh.. as a lot of them are actually funny.. and usually make some sort of point on stopping the spread or keeping yourself safe/sane... like the "stay the fuck at home" song. Grin

Oh, a “cower in your cages, bitches” song. It is demoralization porn. “safe/sane”? No, not sane...

Quote from: nullius on Today at 02:04:03 AM

In the old days, B.V., self-isolation, avoidance of socialization, and anything that could be called “social distancing” from fear of germs was considered an indicator of need for psychotherapy.

...and ultimately not safe, either.

The nature of life is that you will be safe when you are dead.

Just in case Lauda’s post was TL;DR:

Quote from: ibminer on Today at 12:39:04 PM

I just didn't see anything funny with this particular joke/game, so it came off as mocking, which doesn't feel right to me given the circumstances.

Quote from: ibminer on Today at 12:39:04 PM

narcissistic bullies

Want to make Internet armchair diagnoses of others? First, cure thyself.

Quote from: Foxpup on Today at 03:59:34 PM

And before anyone tries to claim that we're all suffering as a result of the pandemic, and therefore we can all joke about it: if the worst you've had to face is running out of toilet paper, you're not really suffering, and if you think you are, you don't (yet) know the true meaning of the word.

So, virtue is measured by suffering; and thus with suffering is accorded the moral right to speak freely and behave normally. Where do I get a Foxpup official imprimatur of sufficient suffering to know “the true meaning of the word”?

What you just said is despicable. Go stuff where it belongs your unwarranted assumptions about Internet screen names whom you know nothing about.

For my part, I could give professional lessons on real-world suffering, physical hardship, and tragedy that NONE of the whiners on this thread can even imagine. That is not an unwarranted assumption: The public display of weakness is ipso facto evidence of having suffered insufficiently to be either killed by it, or hardened to it. As would be known by one who has.

Protip: “That which does not kill me, makes me stronger” is another Nietzsche aphorism, oft misapplied with a dose of saccharine glurge by witlings who are ignorant of its origin and meaning:

Quote from: Nietzsche (Twilight of the Idols, “Maxims and Missiles”, Aphorism 8 )

From life’s school of war. —That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.

[Aus der Kriegsschule des Lebens. — Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.]

It is the diametric opposite of this fetishization of suffering.

It is the forge-fire of a double-edged sword that cuts first against one’s own weaknesses of character, before swinging out against others.

(Nietzsche would know: He lived for years with debilitating, torture-level chronic pain.)