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Comment by qubex | Hacker News Reader

I briefly considered that but I couldn’t bring myself to countenance that somebody would make light of a bona fide ethnic cleansing.

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Making a joke about something is not necessarily "making light of it". It can be a way for an individual or culture to approach and digest a topic that is too difficult or painful to engage with directly.

First responders and medical professionals famously often have a sense of humor too dark to use around outsiders without causing offence/outrage(like what happened here), but I'm quite sure they are not "making light" of the loss of life and terrible injuries they face and fight.

So are you planning to go into a synagogue sometime soon and doing a skit about how the Holocaust wasn’t so bad?

HN is not an armenian space equivalent to a synagogue, and the original poster did not say nor imply that the armenian genocide "wasn't so bad"(in other words: make light of it). Arguably what they did was a form of spreading awareness, even.

If you're arguing in good faith, you need to take about three steps back and realize what caliber of strawman you're fighting against here.

I am absolutely arguing in good faith, and you should abstain from downplaying the atrocities that have befallen others and who still scar their descendants to this day. An off-colour joke was made and nobody here is calling it out for what it is, everybody is piling on to defend who made it. The joke was crass and insensitive and, if absolutely I must point this out, insofar as the original post was regarding the Armenian language it is highly likely that the original poster is Armenian themselves, making this Armenian-centric dialogue a kind of “Armenian space”.

>downplaying the atrocities

Like three times in this conversation I've explicitly differentiated between 'making jokes about' and 'downplaying' something, and every time you have failed to engage with my reasoning and instead chosen to simply double down on your two-dimensional accusation.

Just because you state that “making jokes about” is not tantamount to “downplaying” doesn’t mean I have to accept your distinction. They are materially indistinguishable in this context.

>doesn’t mean I have to accept your distinction

No, but not engaging with my argument supporting my position(about the emergency workers, though if your point is about this specific joke and not jokes about taboo topics in general I'll admit that that is moot), and setting up strawmen("about how the Holocaust wasn’t so bad?") means you're not arguing in good faith.

This isn't a discussion, you're just yelling your opinion at me over and over.

Fair enough, you might have a point insofar as we need not agree — the same goes both ways. However I find it hard to label a sequence of words that underplays the magnitude of the ‘issue’ to be worthy of the term ‘joke’. I can see that I might’ve been carried away in making my point, but it still stands when said more placidly: genocide is not a laughing matter.

>underplays the magnitude of the ‘issue’

That jogged me a little: The magnitude of the issue would be different in the mind of any person: The original poster of the joke and I see more of a historical fact and engage with it fairly casually, while someone very directly affected might still (I maintain, though you don't have to agree) make jokes about it, but a very different kind of joke, one that does include the seriousness of the issue to them.

I'm having a little trouble articulating it, but I think my point is: You were "right" to call out the original joke as coming from a place of not-as-serious-about-the-genocide as, well, you seem to be. But this is a function of us, the people who indeed are not as serious about it as those more closely affected, not of it being a joke.

Ethnic cleansing is what Azerbaijan recently did to ethnic Armenian citizens of Azerbaijan (expelling them and stealing their homes when they fled to Armenia). What Turkey did was straight up genocide (forcibly marching them through the desert where many died)

https://youtu.be/Rr9zXuG0-c0?si=O14GnPdhFXWKeMUm

Both of those are genocide, and both of those are ethnic cleansing, and what's the relevance of the other one and why did you even bring it up?

That’s a great example of “whataboutism”.

Only if you didn't read it, and just assign random opinions that you don't like to people who seem to disagree with your characterizations of things. Extremely twitter-brained.

No, saying that the Armenian genocide wasn't just "ethnic cleansing" isn't "a great example of whataboutism."

Well then same goes for saying, there was no genocide.

Oh fuck off. My grandfather survived the Nazi occupation in southern Russia, was playing Hitler in the school theater comedy some 5 years later.

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