In a statement released Friday, Seattle's police union said a video of its vice president joking after the death of 23-year-old Jaahnavi Kandula lacks context.
“I intended the comment as a mockery of lawyers — I was imitating what a lawyer tasked with negotiating the case would be saying and being sarcastic to express that they shouldn’t be coming up with crazy arguments to minimize the payment,” Auderer wrote in the August statement, adding that he was laughing “at the ridiculousness of how these incidents are litigated.”
Pretty sure we all got that super insightful critique of the legal system. Explaining the joke doesn’t really change anything.
The problem isn’t the critique, my friends and I use this kind of dark humour regularly.
The problem is that you absolutely don’t get to use such humour when you are the perpetrator.
Plus, this humour is only “funny” as a means not to be terminally depressed and crying all the time about the unending stupidity surrounding us, and our constant feeling of helplessness.
Having it disfigured by a pig in such an ugly way, on top of what he did, is truly adding insult to injury. Poor woman, what a tragedy for her family and friends…
I think I am wasting mental resources trying to figure out how he thinks this makes his joke seem less callous? Like “Oh you just killed a young person - well lemme tale this moment to impersonate what a inhumane ass of a lawyer would say to lighten the mood…”
Simple. He saw people make dark jokes, probably to deal with the grim reality they are stuck in, entirely misunderstood the complete process (reasoning, humorous device, etc), and decided to appropriate them anyway as he saw them as “one of the ways to get immunity”.
As I always say: the real issue in appropriation isn’t the appropriation in itself; it’s that too many of the people who appropriate foreign (to them) cultures, ways, etc., do so with such unimaginable stupidity that it absolutely ridicules and insults the original cultural expression. And when they are done, they can revert to their former identity anytime, without damaging it in any way.
Pretty sure we all got that super insightful critique of the legal system. Explaining the joke doesn’t really change anything.
The problem isn’t the critique, my friends and I use this kind of dark humour regularly.
The problem is that you absolutely don’t get to use such humour when you are the perpetrator.
Plus, this humour is only “funny” as a means not to be terminally depressed and crying all the time about the unending stupidity surrounding us, and our constant feeling of helplessness.
Having it disfigured by a pig in such an ugly way, on top of what he did, is truly adding insult to injury. Poor woman, what a tragedy for her family and friends…
I think I am wasting mental resources trying to figure out how he thinks this makes his joke seem less callous? Like “Oh you just killed a young person - well lemme tale this moment to impersonate what a inhumane ass of a lawyer would say to lighten the mood…”
Simple. He saw people make dark jokes, probably to deal with the grim reality they are stuck in, entirely misunderstood the complete process (reasoning, humorous device, etc), and decided to appropriate them anyway as he saw them as “one of the ways to get immunity”.
As I always say: the real issue in appropriation isn’t the appropriation in itself; it’s that too many of the people who appropriate foreign (to them) cultures, ways, etc., do so with such unimaginable stupidity that it absolutely ridicules and insults the original cultural expression. And when they are done, they can revert to their former identity anytime, without damaging it in any way.