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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 a

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.

ziggysak 9y ago
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.
kbenson 9y ago
> 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.
- ziggysak 9y ago
  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.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    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.

ziggysak 9y ago

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.

kbenson 9y ago

> 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.

ziggysak 9y ago
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.
- kbenson 9y ago
  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.