Life is all about the LULZ

Excuse the quality of this screenshot. I'm too tired to do anything about it.

And it goes on.
I can't remember how I stumbled upon this hilarious dialogue, but I did.

When I read the dialogue, all I did was giggle and all I knew was that this David Thorne person is clearly a funny person. Then I found out that this David Thorne person, 41, is 'an Australian humourist, satirist, and Internet personality'. Apparently he's somewhat Internet sexy for doing stuff like this. I understand why. The email conversation with George Lewis is great.

But it's not this simple.

Soon David Thorne ruins it.

"Did she eat them?"

George is clearly painfully unintelligent. He obviously knows only one way to debate, and this is it. ("We would smash your fucking skull in.") What's disappointing is that David kind of ruins the whole joke by asking whether George's fat girlfriend 'ate' her dead family.

What made the thing so extraordinary in the first place was that David didn't lower himself to George's Neanderthal level. But then he did. He did, because this is the Internet, and the First Unofficial Rule of the Internet is that if you CAN hurt someone, you MUST hurt someone. Hurting others will make other monkeys laugh, and when they laugh, you're socially accepted, and being socially accepted is the only thing that really matters for people like this, people like David Thorne.

George is an idiot. He can't help it. It's very easy to bully him, but the most radical, and ultimately the most hilarious, thing would be to be nice to him.

I wanted to know more about David Thorne. The more information I found, the more I started to despise him. Turns out that Thorne's humour is mainly psychopathic. The more I found out, the more I started to despise myself for having laughed along.

Like many Internet humourists, Thorne is a bully. In most of his jokes, the funny element is how he humiliates people that are a bit slow, a bit sensitive, not so good at getting the joke. The motive is simple: if I do this, the other monkeys will reward me.

The other monkeys are predictable.
David Thorne 'made his co-workers life a living hell' (apparently because the co-worker was a bit dim and listened to Nickelback; every self-respecting Internet badass must know that Nickelback, just like Twilight and Justin Bieber, is on the list of Things That We Hate) and then bragged about it online. Here are some of the reactions.

See Cynthia Chalmers wisely noting that the tormented co-worker should have stopped 'bitching' and instead, left the workplace. Very good, Cynthia.

And when Herb Roe asks, "Why is everyone so happy with the antics of a bully?", here's what Johnny Metall has to say: "Awww, did you guys get picked on too? :D"

It is obvious that David Thorne is a bully. The individuals above^ would probably say that they're against bullying if you asked them. But this time the bully is articulate and funny, so they get confused and forget to pretend that they're Good People. Many of the social mechanisms of bullying can be seen in the comments of these fine people.

I mean, if it's funny and it's on the Internet, how could there possibly be something wrong with it?

One of the creepiest sides of the whole David Thorne thing is that he puts the names, pictures (!) and, in some cases, phone numbers (!!) of his victims on his website for millions to see. Let's hurt people and those close to them, let's really hurt them and see if we can destroy their lives; they don't need their lives anymore, because they were too slow to get your joke.

(There's a small grain of hope that these people are not real; that Thorne himself made them up. I truly, truly hope that this is the case, but I'm afraid it's not.)

Thorne humiliates people who contact him for unusual reasons, and people who are disturbed by his behaviour or defend the ones he's targeted before.

To me, one of the most unpleasant of all these cases (and sigh, also one of the most popular of them) is an email conversation he had with a woman whose cat was missing.

The dialogue continues as you'd expect. Shannon tells David that she's "extremely emotional over this and was up all night in tears", and David, the cool unfeeling Internet person, tortures her oh so hilariously. Shannon, understandably upset about her missing kitten, keeps ignoring the fact that David's making fun of her, while David, once again, torments her in hopes of later making other monkeys on the Internet laugh.

Instead of helping Shannon out, David makes stuff up about his amusingly cool life, pretends to be unable to understand what Shannon's asking him to do and spends time creating amusing movie posters about the missing cat.

Yes. It is funny. I laughed too, but strangely, I think that whether something is funny or not is not the only thing that makes a difference.

But why would you need weird crap like compassion on the Internet? If you CAN turn another person's tragedy into a comedy about you, you MUST do it.

Apparently we're supposed to be on David's side. We're supposed to think that Shannon's call for help is completely ridiculous and unreasonable; Missy's 'just a cat' and Shannon must be a real sentimental lunatic to care about losing her.

I mean, David's got "two clients expecting completed work this afternoon". So instead of spending his day 'making his co-worker's life a living hell', he's forced to waste his precious time HELPING another person. How unfair. I'm glad he refused to do such an insane thing.

Wait... What? It's the Internet and I'm being serious? I'm DEFENDING the sensitive kids and the slow kids?! What's wrong with me?!? Very disturbing.

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I guess the difference between people like me and people like David Thorne is that I don't do things like these to other people. I don't want to destroy anybody's life.

If I somehow managed to destroy another human being's life, I would hate myself deeply. And then, if a group of assholes came up to me and told me that what I did was "hilarious", I would hate them just as deeply. Their approval would mean nothing to me. I'd do everything I could to fix the situation and help the person whose life I'd destroyed. Because if I didn't, I'd spend the rest of my days thinking about that person, hating my pathetic self for having done what I did.

I guess that's the difference.