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Comment by ziggysak | Hacker News Reader

I think an article such as this one is a clear example of the generational differences between older and younger people. I'm fairly close to these kids' age and I've browsed memes from /r/dankmemes and enjoyed them.

The thing is, is that these memes are supposed to be self-aware of how offensive they are. That's the joke. They're meant to be so offensive and ridiculous that reactions can be drawn from outside spectators so they can get offended and you can laugh at them for being a "normie".

I have no issue with these jokes unless they've been made in a sincere attempt at racism or sexism, and knowing my experience with the internet, I don't believe this is the case.

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It's not a new thing. Dead baby jokes have been around forever, and popular comedians often use similar black humor. The article mentions the card game cards against humanity. Which is pretty popular and based on the same premise.

I used to really like black humor. I frequently told dead baby jokes and similar stuff. Thank god that wasn't recorded.

I'm alarmed to see many of the comments here outraged over the stuff the students said. I guarantee most of them have probably told a similarly offensive joke at some point in time, or at the very least have friends who have. Especially when they were younger.

I agree, but what is new is that suddenly kids are having their college acceptances revoked for dead baby jokes that the administrators probably also joked about 30 years ago, when they were 18.

> The article mentions the card game cards against humanity. Which is pretty popular and based on the same premise.

Except that the premise of Cards Against Humanity is that you are all opting in to the situation where you expect that, and usually an a somewhat private setting.

The equivalent to the CAH suggestion would be where some private group of people indicated that to become members, you had to go to a public cafe and play CAH loudly in public. Were that Cafe to get mad at you and ban you from their premises, getting upset at that outcome is rather silly. You either knew that was a possibly outcome, or you should have known. In any case, that Cafe is well within their rights to decide they want nothing to do with you anymore.

I wouldn't consider that equivalent at all. This was an invite-only private chat between students. So in other words, it would be like they were playing CAH in a dorm room and somebody in the group decided to tell on them to administration.

It's actually somewhat unclear exactly what happened. From the article:

Some of the group’s members decided to form an offshoot group in which students could share obscene, “R-rated” memes, a student told the Crimson. The founders of the messaging group demanded that students post provocative memes in the main group chat to gain admittance to the smaller group.

But from wording later, the examples given seem to be from the private group? I'm also unclear if the private group some some offshoot of the main group within Facebook (that is, whether it's some Facebook sub-group feature, obviously they are members of the main group).

In any case, Harvard says they reserve the right to reject admission based on "honesty, maturity, or moral character" so if this information is brought to their attention, then it falls under what they consider valid acceptance criteria. It's no different than if they Google searched the applicant initially and found verifiable information that put the student in the same light.

I'm probably around the same age you are, and I have to disagree with you that these kinds of jokes are harmless.

For one thing, cultures like this do provide safe havens to people who actually hold bigoted views 'sincerely'. I've been in IRL conversations that ran along these norms, and it was a really uncomfortable experience, especially as a member of a favorite 4Chan target group. It became fairly obvious over the course of the evening that one of the guys there really had drunk a fair bit of the 4Chan kool-aid, but how can you call him out when everyone is cracking the same jokes? Few things shut down open exchange of ideas faster than than the thought that the person you're talking to fundamentally doesn't respect you, because of who you are.

But that's not even the real problem I have with this kind of in-group offense culture - the real problem is that no one is ever as self-aware as they think they are. What you say shapes how you think, and then how you act, in ways we may never be consciously aware of. The students Harvard produces are going to end up in board rooms, courtrooms, and halls of power of all kinds all over the country; I expect them to be disciplined thinkers both academically and socially, who take these kinds of issues with the seriousness they deserve, not trollface memesters hiding their intellectual laziness behind image macros.

To your first point: It's certainly immoral to be a true bigot, but it's more immoral to silence dark humor simply because of the one individual who believes it. In fact, I would argue that attempting to stifle these individuals is what amplifies their tendency to hold bigoted views. For example, if you're in an in-real-life group conversation and you're all friends and you're roasting another friend for something he did, it's completely fine. But once someone goes too far and begins insulting him sincerely, you punish the person who made the insult, not the group.

As to your second point, I don't know why you think people who enjoy memes are somehow intellectually lazy. I don't really see how your logic works here as memes are simply jokes transmitted via the internet. Are you implying that anyone who makes jokes or enjoys dark comedy has to be intellectually lazy?

More immoral to silence bigotry than to be a bigot? I find that hard to accept. At the legal level, sure, no one should be prosecuted for being a dick. But that isn't what we're discussing here, we're talking about setting the tone of a community of people, in a way that maximizes both everyone's enjoyment and the amount of stuff they can get done. Tolerating bigotry fatally undermines both of those. As for the bad apples, certainly vilifying an individual for their opinions is way more likely to make them double down in righteous indignation, and ideally there'd be a more compassionate way to engage people like that in conversation, but at the very least we can prevent them spreading their ideas in fora we control.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good meme as much as the next millenial. But there are memes and there are memes. You seem to be implying that "beep beep lettuce" and Pepe wearing a Nazi uniform are equivalent to one another. And yes, by the definition of "dark comedy" we're using here, it is lazy. Everyone knows where the boundaries of generally accepted good taste are. There's no skill or wit involved in breaching them. You mention Dave Chappelle elsewhere in this thread; if you look at him, or Mel Brooks, or other 'great' dark comedians, all of the shock there is in the service of making some larger point about society. And sure it doesn't always work, but by your own argument there's not even a semblance of that kind of intent in 'dark meme comedy'. If all a joke is trying to do is give its audience a fleeting thrill of transgression, that's a pretty low form of humor.

I think we just have different views on how to approach bigotry. We both can agree that it is a black mark on our society and we should overcome it as a culture.

However, where we disagree is how to do it. I see the current climate of "preventing the spread of bigoted ideas" as creating what we know as the alt-right. If you check 4chan's /pol/, you will see an incredible amount of people admit to becoming alt-right because "so many snowflakes are always so offended and call me names". If, however, we as a society can more tolerate dark humor and bigoted comments, the bigots either stop talking or evolve to accept more tolerant views. This article as whole is perfect fuel for the alt-right to say "liberals are trying to control everything, even jokes".

To your second point: Pepe wearing a Nazi uniform is not dark comedy. It's racism. They're using memes to further their own ideology, as opposed to the Harvard students who were simply making fun of the offensive nature of the jokes.

Thirdly, I truly don't care for whether or not it's high or low humor. All I'm looking at is intent and whether or not an individual is actively desiring to inflict damage on another group of people. Alt-right memes do this, while the Harvard kids would be the first to admit they were simply making jokes who were not hurting anyone other than the people who decided to be offended by them.

> If you check 4chan's /pol/, you will see an incredible amount of people admit to becoming alt-right because "so many snowflakes are always so offended and call me names". If, however, we as a society can more tolerate dark humor and bigoted comments, the bigots either stop talking or evolve to accept more tolerant views.

No, the bigots then just push the line further, and further, and further, to normalize their bigotry because "yeah they're jokes but they make a good point, you know?"--and if you say "no, that's wrong," you get "it's just a joke, brah, why are you so offended?"

That's what /pol/ is. That's what it's been since its inception. It has been a bunch of useful idiots with a hard core of literal fascists being edged further and further right by pushing that line through rhetoric and through those "harmless" memes.

I used to be there. I spent a lot of time watching this. They turned people to actual hard-core bad shit through that "humor".

I used to be there too, and still am so I can observe how it's evolving. I'm not necessarily even disagreeing with you, but what I am arguing for is not normalizing the bigotry, it's to go back to not even considering their views. The issues arise when we give the alt-right names like "alt-right". It makes them sound powerful and organized.

They're not "literal fascists". Literal fascists were in Italy overthrowing the government 70 years ago. All these people have is the ability to create chaos. When we give them coverage and attention, we feed them. What you're advocating for is what we're doing right now - trying to shut off these toxic wells. But what it's simply doing is adding fuel to the fire.

Evaluating the sincerity of racism and sexism? You're overcomplicating it. The mere expression of it fouls the air and puts a world where people love and respect each other just a little further out of reach. It's like evaluating the motivations of a belching coal smokestack.

How does that dynamic work in this situation in which there was not intended to be an outside audience?

That's a very fair point. I've made plenty of these jokes before to my friends and sent memes that are blatantly offensive because of the taboo factor. It's black comedy. Similarly to how Aristophanes made fun of Socrates and basically created the genre of dark humor.

Justine Sacco went out the same way.

poe's law?

'Ironic' racism is still racism.

Actually, it isn't. Racism is based in the belief that one group is superior to the other. If one is making an ironic joke, it does not imply any intent of racism on their part.

Racism is not simply about belief, otherwise there could be no such thing as racist action.

Personally, I couldn't care less what people believe, I care what people do. And in this case what they did was clearly racist.

So should black comedians be jailed for their jokes when they generalize about other groups? Should Dave Chapelle be in prison for making jokes about white people, since that's what you're implying?

Racism is defined as prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.

What these kids did was not racist.

First of all, where did I say anything about prison?

Second, this was clearly antagonism directed against someone of a different race, and is therefore racist.

Antagonism is hostility. You're actually the one who even mentioned this being black humor, so this can't be antagonism if we both agree these are jokes. Trying to make people laugh using taboo subjects is not antagonism.

As for prison, I'm implying what consequences you would assume for individuals who would be so vocal about what you would call their racist acts.

See my comment above. It's not any more racism than joking about dead babies means you actually want to kill babies. It's not any more racism than playing cards against humanity makes you an unforgivable monster. Black humor is extremely common and as old as time.

Black humor can still be racist. Something being (ostensibly) a joke doesn't mean it can't be racist/sexist/whatever.

Black comedy or dark comedy is a comic style that makes light of subject matter that is generally considered taboo.

So no, if you define a joke as 'black humor', the taboo IS the joke. If the intent of the joke is sincere racism, it's not black humor.

humor with the intention of ridiculing something by using its own tropes to the point of absurdity to show the wrongness/badness of the thing is a well-established form of satire and commentary.

a satirist is emphatically NOT in concordance or agreement with that which they are satirizing. I find it unreasonable that you are arguing against this basic premise. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you. I hope I am because If I am really understanding you correctly it seems to me like you are making something far worse than a fallacious argument, but really something that rises to the level of destructive of the meaning of words.

You're assuming the people employing that black humor don't believe what they're saying.

I, and I expect the person to whom you reply, don't adhere to that assumption. I think that "just a joke", in this context, is the exhibition of profound naivete. And even if the speaker realizes it's a joke--the listeners often don't. See the /pol/ commentary elsewhere in this thread; /pol/ was "just joking" until those jokes were taken as articles of faith and became the core of a literally fascist movement.

Yes people employing black humor don't believe what they are saying. That's literally the whole point. I really doubt there are that many people that actually want to murder babies. Or do any of the insane things that come up in a good cards against humanity game.

Maybe you could make a utilitarian argument against black humor. Maybe you could argue that such jokes encourage actual baby killers and the world would be better without them. I really doubt that's true, but even if it was, it's a very different argument. People want these kids expelled because they think they are actual monsters, which is probably false. Not because of theoretical arguments of the utility of banning black humor.

Pols transition to conservatism has nothing to do with black humor, but how it's set up. It's a site that not only doesn't censor, but strongly encourages discussions on taboo topics. Of course it will attract people that believe taboo ideologies and are banned or ostracized elsewhere.

This is simply incorrect. /pol/ has never attempted to be "ironically" fascist. Its memes have always been a true reflection of sincere fascism and racism.

/r/dankmemes has similar subject matter but it's clear that it's ironic and it's black humor.

They are two fundamentally different things. Nobody is being indoctrinated into being a fascist from the latter. The former is actively attempting indoctrination.

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