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> Because it’s a meme derived from human suffering. It’s meant to be in bad taste — that’s the source of the humor. I don’t agree. To me, it’s derived from man
by Semaphor 2y ago
> Because it’s a meme derived from human suffering. It’s meant to be in bad taste — that’s the source of the humor.
I don’t agree. To me, it’s derived from many things, like juxtaposing something incredibly stressful and dangerous, with something else.
I’d go further and say the suffering that happened is only important in that it made the demon core popular and well-known, but the memes would still work if it somehow became well-known without the death and suffering because no accident happened.
- jonathrg 2y agoThe source of the humor is that what Slotin did is extremely funny. So obscenely reckless.
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- lenerdenator 2y agoPart of me thinks he'd laugh his ass off at the memes. Hell, when the accident happened, he said, "Well, that does it."
- Forgeties79 2y agoYeah I’ve always thought the juxtaposition of 1) these high level experts with 2) one of the most dangerous objects we’ve ever created against the ways 2 was treated by 1 is part of the entertainment. Like its own unique and wildly unexpected category of the Darwin awards. Yeah it’s sad but it is almost difficult to believe, so it ends up being kind of funny
- vundercind 2y agoYep. It's like someone chain-smoking cigarettes while working with gasoline. There's a "yo, WTF?" humor to how reckless it is. Off-primary use of a mundane hand tool being the only thing preventing a minor nuclear disaster is simply funny. Like God forming man from mud not with the fine tools of a master clay-worker, but a child's play-doh plastic carving tools and a couple toothpicks.
- AlexandrB 2y agoIt's actually pretty hard to ignite gasoline with cigarettes: https://mythresults.com/special7 https://mythresults.com/special7
- cma 2y agoModern cigarettes have ammonium phosphate in the paper as a retardant, does that make it harder to ignite gas?
- aftbit 2y agoMy mom once worked as a gas station attendant and general gopher, back when gas stations had car repair shops attached (late 70s). She used to chain smoke as well. Whenever a customer would complain, she would intentionally spill a tiny bit of gasoline on the ground[1], then put her cigarette out in the puddle. She told me she would never light one while filling, because the spark and flame from the lighter could be enough to start a fire, but that the cigarette itself was not hot enough. I've never repeated this experiment. 1: Yeah I know this is a bad idea itself, but what can you do? She was ~20 and her pre-frontal cortex was still not fully developed.
- fwip 2y agoNit-pick: the meme about people's prefrontal-cortex not being fully developed until age 25 is not true. What is true is that there was a longitudinal study that found that people's brains continued to change under MRI as far as they tracked the participants, which was below the age of 25.
- thefifthsetpin 2y agoThe nit is that the change observed was not development?
- fwip 2y ago
- tokai 2y agoYeah the article completely misses the mark there. The suffering is not even a part of the meme, nobody really delves into that.
- PaulHoule 2y agoI think it's about that ecstasy in losing yourself in something that can sometimes cause you to lose your life.
- sho_hn 2y agoI think it's about something else: In German there's the word "betriebsblind", an adjective that describes a state of knowing better but out of convenience/lazyness/routine foregoing precautions or ignoring warning signs, often resulting in preventable calamity. It's relatable: It's so human to experience fatigue and just let it go and do it the quick way that one time. From jaywalking to not checking whether the power is turned off. The Demon Core is an exciting parable about how closely we're flirting with death when we do that. Just one little slip, and life completely changes from one moment to the next. It's that wretching discomfort of how easy it is to imagine being Slotin. The nihilistic humor/sarcasm is a way to cope/confront it all.
- skullt 2y agoThat doesn't quite fit either. Slotin did the screwdriver trick a bunch of times before the accident. He was showing off.
- vanderZwan 2y agoWeirdly enough that conclusion reminds me of a scene I once saw in a nature documentary. It involved a species of birds where the males showed off their "fitness" to the females by doing dangerous things. One remarkable thing was that in one particular area near a highway, a group had adapted to show off by diving in front of a car without being hit (I guess that that species already used to do that with snakes and other predators before). Anyway, in a general sense that's a particular type of sexual selection[0] that's been observed more often: showing that you are a healthy individual with good genes by taking risks. It probably has name. I suspect that with humans it's also an instinctual way of showing off who is the strongest in your peer group, without the sexual selection connotations. EDIT: turns out the wikipedia article was one click removed from what I had in mind: signaling theory! (the evolutionary biology version) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory
- anon84873628 2y ago>juxtaposing something incredibly stressful and dangerous, with something else. That "something else" to me is the absolute ease of the act. I think we normally expect the scale of the consequences to match the setup difficulty. Simply bringing two pieces of metal together for instant death? It's absolute magic! So there's also the wizardry component of it. It tickles our love of fantasy stories and arcane power, and the irresponsible handling thereof. Elsewhere someone mentions lighting cigarettes at a gas station. That situation has similar aspects, but lacks the magical flair.
- mikewarot 2y ago>Simply bringing two pieces of metal together for instant death? It's absolute magic! There wasn't anything instant about the death, from Wikipedia:[1] Despite intensive medical care and offers from numerous volunteers to donate blood for transfusions, Slotin's condition was incurable.[2] He called his parents and they were flown at Army expense from Winnipeg to be with him. They arrived on the fourth day after the incident, and by the fifth day his condition started to deteriorate rapidly. Over the next four days, Slotin suffered an "agonizing sequence of radiation-induced traumas", including severe diarrhea, reduced urine output, swollen hands, erythema, "massive blisters on his hands and forearms", intestinal paralysis and gangrene. He had internal radiation burns throughout his body, which one medical expert described as a "three-dimensional sunburn." By the seventh day, he was experiencing periods of "mental confusion." His lips turned blue and he was put in an oxygen tent. He ultimately experienced "a total disintegration of bodily functions" and slipped into a coma. Slotin died at 11 a.m. on 30 May, in the presence of his parents. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#Slotin's_death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#Slotin's_death
- fluoridation 2y agoIt was instant in that his fate was sealed in an instant. This is unlike basically every other form of death. If you're bleeding out there's a chance you can be patched up and transfused. If a cancer is killing you it could get treated. But Slotin was a dead man walking the moment his hand slipped; there was nothing anyone could do about it.
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- caseyy 2y agoI also disagree with the author. They don't consider the relationship between the meme makers/viewers and the demon core incident. And while it was horrific to those involved, most people have experienced maybe 0.1% of that terror – and that is good. They can and should make light of it. Expecting everyone to be deeply affected by all traumatic experiences throughout history is unrealistic. We have defence mechanisms to cope with the overwhelming weight of global suffering, and breaking them down is a bad idea. So shaming those who managed to distance themselves from such events (by saying their dark comedy is in bad taste) is condescending. I say it's good to have healthy coping strategies and not be overly affected by awful events we were not exposed to directly – that is called healthy mental resilience. Not everyone should suffer because anyone else has. People should and will still joke, even when awful things have happened to billions in every conceivable niche of life. Really, I would even argue one should not absorb more suffering and terror than they would have been exposed to in one life-time, even if the internet and news media makes it easy. One should certainly, without any doubt in my mind not internalize every tragedy in history in an effort to stifle humour.
- whoopdedo 2y agoMost comedy is tragic.[1] And laughing is an inherently selfish act, as Mel Brooks observed when he said, "comedy is when you fall in an open sewer and die."[2] [1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/06/25/comedy-plus/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/06/25/comedy-plus/ [2] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/mel-brooks-film-excerpt-the-difference-between-comedy-tragedy-is/2585/ https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/mel-brooks-film-exc...
- MayeulC 2y ago"Comedy is tragedy plus time". That quote seems to have multiple origins, though I remember it from Portal, an unlikely source.
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- cwkoss 2y agoAmerican propaganda likes to paint the nuclear scientists as heroes, but I think the younger generation likely views them much more as "evil scientists who worked to create apocalyptic weapons" and feel comfortable with a lack of empathy for them harming themselves in the process.
- o11c 2y agoI wonder how much of that is all the WWII vets being gone and not being able to hear their thankfulness at not having to invade Japan the hard way (after what happened on Iwo Jima and Okinawa).
- cess11 2y agoThose bombs and the "Operation Meetinghouse" firebombing of Tokyo was mostly directed at civilian targets. The subsequent invasion and occupation is unlikely to have been harder to perform without it.
- julianeon 2y agoI can't help but feel like this (completely overlooked) facet played a part in the humor for its original audience. From a certain point of view, he was 1 more casualty of a weapon that went on to kill 150-240k people thereafter. Live by the sword, etc.
- ginko 2y ago>he was 1 more casualty of a weapon that went on to kill 150-240k people thereafter. Live by the sword, etc. The Slotin incident happened in 1946, after WW2 had ended.
- colejohnson66 2y agoOP was referencing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The total deaths from those two atomic bombs is estimated at 150-240k.
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