by OrangeEyebrows » Tue May 19, 2015 8:20 pm
I suppose my take on this is that Miley Cyrus is highly unlikely to roll up to TCS and feel sad that people have been saying undeservedly nasty things about her, whereas there's a good chance Cracked contributors could ('cause they have and continue to). I know that when I joined, if I'd come across threads where people were attacking my character, I would have run away and never come back (Clearly I'm not as kickass as Cher). People saying, "Wow, she really didn't do her research for that article where she claimed Pluto was made of liver pate" would be one thing, but, "Jesus, does she even wake up to write this stuff or does someone just transcribe her nocturnal drooling?" would be another.
There's a bit of a weird relationship here because regular Cracked contributors, and especially the columnists, to some extent occupy the sector of our brain marked "Celebrities", with all the black-and-white thinking that comes along with - it's very easy to class celebrities as either minor gods or just completely awful, and because hurt feelings have been involved, it's even easier to do the latter. It's easy to forget they're complex human beings who, if we got to know them, we'd probably agree with, disagree with, find hilarious, find infuriating or find unutterably dull depending on the day and the topic at hand. Just like everyone else. Or, you know, in some particular cases we (as individuals, not as a TCS hive mind) might just dislike them. That happens.
The thing is, unless we keep that in mind when discussing Cracked, we might never get the opportunity to discover a new friend (or really exciting new nemesis), because not everybody has the grace or self-possession to shrug off thoughtless insults. So this isn't directed at anyone in particular - and definitely not at you, Adric, because I appreciate the effort you've made to reassess your way of thinking - but my take-away is that we need to be more thoughtful when discussing Cracked. "If the person I'm talking about were reading this, would they be hurt? And if they would, would hurting them be a fair response to this article they've written about Ten Mindblowing Facts About Cheese?"
A society without redemption would damn us all ~ Kate