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April Fool's Day - the day when trust is a punishable offense.
I think April Fools Day is a cruel holiday because the generally accepted way to celebrate is to pull the sorts of pranks that humiliate the person being pranked. On the internet especially, they rely on telling someone a lie, someone who, on every other day has no reason to expect you to lie to them, and then punishing them when they believe a lie from an otherwise trusted person.
"Ha ha! You believed me! You trusted someone who has spent time building up a trusting relationship with you! Fool! You are so silly for trusting me!"
I do not enjoy or appreciate humor at the expense of other people's embarrassment or shame. And I particularly do not appreciate taking advantage of other people's ability or desire to trust the word of people they know and like, or even expecting a basic level of courtesy from strangers.
Some people like the idea that this holiday teaches "critical thinking", but it doesn't. It teaches cynicism and guardedness and that humiliating others can be funny like, ever. As both a skeptic and a cynic, I know the difference. If it taught critical thinking, it wouldn't last just for the day. It teaches *distrust*, which is not the same thing as "critical thinking", even though critical thinking requires the desire to verify information. Skepticism (and the critical thinking that underlies it) is not a lack of *trust* or an active *distrust*, it is a lack of *credulity*, which is a *very* different animal.
The next most common way to celebrate is with physical pranks that startle, embarrass, or inconvenience others, such as swapping out the fillings on a sandwich or the classics like toothpaste or plastic wrap on the toilet seat.
If this were a day that *normally* celebrated something like "comedy" with jokes and puns or whatever, that'd be fine. If we only saw pretend products for sale and that was the extent of the "make someone believe the lie", especially if it was more clearly satire like The Onion or ads for obviously spoof products like "unicorn meat", I'd even be OK with that. I enjoy clever satire.
I don't even care that most of the people who like me enough to follow me here not do that other shit, because clearly y'all are not "normal" or y'all wouldn't like me so much. It's what's considered "normal" or common that I usually get up in arms about - social norms. That this kind of cruelty is considered "comedy" says a lot about our culture - none of it good.
It's hard enough to develop and maintain trust in this world without deliberately undermining it with a nationally-sanctioned holiday that seems to be nothing BUT undermining trust and causing embarrassment.
I hate this holiday.
I think April Fools Day is a cruel holiday because the generally accepted way to celebrate is to pull the sorts of pranks that humiliate the person being pranked. On the internet especially, they rely on telling someone a lie, someone who, on every other day has no reason to expect you to lie to them, and then punishing them when they believe a lie from an otherwise trusted person.
"Ha ha! You believed me! You trusted someone who has spent time building up a trusting relationship with you! Fool! You are so silly for trusting me!"
I do not enjoy or appreciate humor at the expense of other people's embarrassment or shame. And I particularly do not appreciate taking advantage of other people's ability or desire to trust the word of people they know and like, or even expecting a basic level of courtesy from strangers.
Some people like the idea that this holiday teaches "critical thinking", but it doesn't. It teaches cynicism and guardedness and that humiliating others can be funny like, ever. As both a skeptic and a cynic, I know the difference. If it taught critical thinking, it wouldn't last just for the day. It teaches *distrust*, which is not the same thing as "critical thinking", even though critical thinking requires the desire to verify information. Skepticism (and the critical thinking that underlies it) is not a lack of *trust* or an active *distrust*, it is a lack of *credulity*, which is a *very* different animal.
The next most common way to celebrate is with physical pranks that startle, embarrass, or inconvenience others, such as swapping out the fillings on a sandwich or the classics like toothpaste or plastic wrap on the toilet seat.
If this were a day that *normally* celebrated something like "comedy" with jokes and puns or whatever, that'd be fine. If we only saw pretend products for sale and that was the extent of the "make someone believe the lie", especially if it was more clearly satire like The Onion or ads for obviously spoof products like "unicorn meat", I'd even be OK with that. I enjoy clever satire.
I don't even care that most of the people who like me enough to follow me here not do that other shit, because clearly y'all are not "normal" or y'all wouldn't like me so much. It's what's considered "normal" or common that I usually get up in arms about - social norms. That this kind of cruelty is considered "comedy" says a lot about our culture - none of it good.
It's hard enough to develop and maintain trust in this world without deliberately undermining it with a nationally-sanctioned holiday that seems to be nothing BUT undermining trust and causing embarrassment.
I hate this holiday.
